Starmer says Putin will ‘sooner or later’ have to come to table as summit begins
Keir Starmer has said Vladimir Putin will “sooner or later” have to “come to the table” as he urged world leaders to keep up the pressure on Russia for an unconditional ceasefire, reports PA news agency.
Key events
UK prime minister Keir Starmer will hold a press conference in Downing Street at 12.30pm on Saturday after his call with leaders of the “coalition of the willing” on a possible peacekeeping operation in Ukraine.
We will post updates as we receive them.
David Smith
In a speech that ran for 100 minutes there was one moment when Donald Trump drew more applause from Democrats than Republicans. As the president told Congress last week how the US had sent billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine, his political opponents clapped and unfurled a Ukrainian flag – while his own party sat in stony silence.
It was a telling insight into Republicans’ transformation, in the space of a generation, from a party of cold war hawks to one of “America first” isolationists. Where Trump has led, many Republicans have obediently followed, all the way into the embrace of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin – with huge implications for the global democratic order.
“The reversal is dramatic and the willingness of the Republican party to go along with it continues to be breathtaking,” said Charlie Sykes, a political commentator and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind. “At least for a while it appeared that Republicans were still going to be supportive of Ukraine. But now that Trump has completely reversed our foreign policy there seems to be very little pushback.”
Last month, Trump set up a peace process that began with the US and Russia’s top diplomats meeting in Saudi Arabia – with no seat at the table for Ukrainian officials. He branded Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a “dictator”, a term he has never applied to the authoritarian Putin.
Along with vice-president JD Vance, he berated Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, a spectacle that prompted the Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin to observe that Ronald Reagan, a Republican president who was an inveterate foe of Soviet aggression, “must be rolling over in his grave”. Trump suspended offensive cyber operations against Russia and paused military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine until it agreed to a 30-day ceasefire.
Here is Zelenskyy’s post on X this morning:
I received a report from commander-in-chief Syrskyi. Defense of our positions in the Donetsk region and other frontline areas. I am grateful to all Ukrainian units for their resilience and effectiveness in destroying the occupier. The situation in the Pokrovsk direction has been stabilized.
A separate note on the Kursk region. The operation of our forces in the designated areas of the Kursk region continues. The units are carrying out their tasks exactly as required. Thanks to the Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region, a significant number of Russian forces were withdrawn from other directions. Our troops continue to hold back Russian and North Korean groupings in the Kursk region. There is no encirclement of our troops.
We are also observing directions along our eastern border of Ukraine, where the Russian army is building up forces. This indicates an intention to attack our Sumy region. We are aware of this, and will counter it. I would like all partners to understand exactly what Putin is planning, what he is preparing for, and what he will be ignoring.
The buildup of Russian forces indicates that Moscow intends to keep ignoring diplomacy. It is clear that Russia is prolonging the war. We are ready to provide our partners with all the real information on the situation at the front, in the Kursk region, and along our border.
Today there were also reports on our missile program. We have tangible results. The long Neptune missile was tested and successfully used in combat. A new Ukrainian missile, precise strike. The range of one thousand kilometers. I thank our Ukrainian developers, manufacturers and military personnel. We continue our work to ensure the security of Ukraine.
Also today, the minister of defense of Ukraine delivered a report on new support packages from our partners. We are securing artillery supplies. I am grateful to all the partners who are helping.”
Zelenskyy says Kursk operation ongoing and Ukrainian troops not encircled
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday that Kyiv’s forces were still fighting in Russia’s Kursk region and that they were not facing an encirclement, reports Reuters.
In a statement on social media, he added that the situation near the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk had stabilised but that Russian forces were accumulating across the border from Ukraine’s north-eastern Sumy region.
Russia had also deployed almost 200 firefighters to help put out a fire at an oil depot caused by a Ukraine drone strike in the southern Krasnodar region, authorities said, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The governor of the Krasnodar region Veniamin Kondratyev said in the early hours of Saturday that a petrol reserve station in the Black Sea city of Tuapse was “attacked by the Kyiv regime”.
The government of the Krasnodar region said 188 people were involved in putting out the fire.
Faisal Ali
Akif Çağatay Kılıç, a foreign policy adviser to Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said that one of the main obstacles to a peace settlement between Ukraine and Russia is a “loss of trust” between the two sides.
Turkey has played a key role as a mediator in talks and maintains good relations with both Kyiv and Moscow, despite its military support for Ukraine. It hosted negotiations in 2022 and has offered to do so again if called on.
Speaking to a Turkish TV station, Kılıç said:
The main problem is a loss of trust. Nobody trusts anyone.”
He referred cryptically to a group of politicians, no longer in power, who he claimed scuppered the initial February 2022 talks in Istanbul, noting that the conditions under which Ukraine is able to negotiate now have changed.
Kılıç said that in 2022 negotiations were aiming to limit Ukraine’s territorial losses to Russia at about 3% but that figure now is at about 25%.
UK prime minister Keir Starmer, French president Emmanuel Macron, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Nato secretary general Mark Rutte have addressed the virtual “coalition of the willing” meeting, a government source told the PA news agency.
Starmer condemned Russia’s “barbaric attacks on Ukraine”, saying Vladimir Putin must “agree to a ceasefire”.
He said at the top of the meeting:
President Zelenskyy, who’s with us this morning, has shown once again that Ukraine is the party of peace, because he has agreed to and committed to a 30-day unconditional ceasefire.
Now what we see, and this is centrepiece for our discussions today, is that Putin is the one trying to delay.
In a sense, and you will know this, if Putin is serious about peace, it’s very simple, he has to stop his barbaric attacks on Ukraine and agree to a ceasefire.”
Starmer continued:
Secondly, being prepared to defend any deal ourselves through a coalition of the willing. We’ve begun that process and this morning we can take it forward.
And then, thirdly, and really importantly, given the developments of the last few days, to keep the pressure on Putin to come to the table, and I think collectively we’ve got a number of ways that we can do that.
So it’s those three heads, really, that we’re going to focus on in this meeting, strengthening Ukraine, being prepared to defend any deal ourselves through a coalition of the willing, and keeping that pressure on Russia at this crucial time.”
Speaking in Downing Street before the video call, UK prime minister Keir Starmer said the “world is watching”.
According to the PA news agency, Starmer said:
My feeling is that sooner or later (Putin’s) going to have to come to the table and engage in serious discussion, but – and this is a big but for us this morning in our meeting – we can’t sit back and simply wait for that to happen.
We have to keep pushing ahead, pushing forward, and preparing for peace, and a peace that will be secure and that will last.
I think that means strengthening Ukraine so they can defend themselves, and strengthening, obviously, in terms of military capability, in terms of funding, in terms of the provision of further support from all of us to Ukraine.”
Putin has to stop ‘barbaric attacks on Ukraine’ if ‘serious about peace’, says Starmer
UK prime minister Keir Starmer told a virtual meeting of about 25 world leaders on Saturday that they had to be prepared to defend any Ukraine peace deal themselves, urging them to keep up pressure on Russia.
“If (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is serious about peace, it’s very simple, he has to stop his barbaric attacks on Ukraine and agree to a ceasefire,” Starmer told the video call of leaders from nations, including from Europe, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
He added:
We have to keep pushing ahead, pushing forward, and preparing for peace and a peace that will be secure and that will last.”
Starmer says Putin will ‘sooner or later’ have to come to table as summit begins
Keir Starmer has said Vladimir Putin will “sooner or later” have to “come to the table” as he urged world leaders to keep up the pressure on Russia for an unconditional ceasefire, reports PA news agency.
David Smith
While we wait for news from Keir Starmer’s virtual summit, my colleague David Smith in Washington has this piece on how Trump has transformed the US Republican party’s stance on Vladimir Putin…
In speech that ran for 100 minutes there was one moment when Donald Trump drew more applause from Democrats than Republicans. As the president told Congress last week how the US had sent billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine, his political opponents clapped and unfurled a Ukrainian flag – while his own party sat in stony silence.
It was a telling insight into Republicans’ transformation, in the space of a generation, from a party of cold war hawks to one of “America first” isolationists. Where Trump has led, many Republicans have obediently followed, all the way into the embrace of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin – with huge implications for the global democratic order.
Read the full piece here:
Ukraine said on Saturday it had downed 130 Russian-launched drones across the country at night, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Kyiv’s air force said the Iranian-made Shahed drones were downed over 14 regions and that Moscow had also attacked with two ballistic missiles.
Kyiv also said that the number of wounded in a Russian strike a day earlier on president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home town Kryvy Rig rose to 14. On Friday, officials said Russia attacked a residential area of the central Ukrainian city – regularly targeted throughout Moscow’s more than three-year invasion.
“Fourteen people were wounded, among them two children,” the head of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Sergiy Lysak, said on Telegram.
Ukrainian prosecutors said the injured children were a two-year-old and a 15-year-old.
Lysak said the missile attack destroyed more than a dozen large apartment buildings and 10 private houses.
Russian troops have recaptured the villages of Rubanshchina and Zaoleshenka in its western Kursk region, the defence ministry said on Saturday.
The Guardian has been unable to independently verify the report.
Ukraine’s largest private energy provider said on Saturday that overnight Russian airstrikes had damaged its energy facilities in the Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa regions.
In a statement, DTEK said “damages are significant” and that some consumers in both regions were left without power, reports Reuters.
