Keir Starmer will not risk riling Donald Trump by challenging him over his attack on Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy when the pair finally meet next week, as the prime minister seeks to cool an escalating transatlantic row.
While Macron has promised to give a blunt message to Trump about the risk of looking weak in the face of Putin, Starmer is hoping to defuse the row, including by avoiding direct reference to the president’s recent comments.
Starmer’s trip comes with European leaders expressing alarm at having been left out of talks between the US and Russia, and at the tone of Trump’s recent remarks about Ukraine.
Trump added to the tensions on Friday when he accused Starmer and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, of having done nothing to help end the war.
Starmer will fly to the US in the coming days for what could be a defining moment in his premiership, as Europe and the US trade accusations and insults about the origins of the war in Ukraine and the best way to end it.
