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Keir Starmer has said he is ready to put British “boots on the ground” to maintain the peace if a deal is done to end the war in Ukraine.
The prime minister said he was working with French president Emmanuel Macron and other European leaders to come up with a plan to present to Donald Trump aimed at finally ending the three-year-long conflict.
He was speaking after hosting an emergency summit of world leaders at Lancaster House in London at which he also set out his plan to build a “coalition of the willing” to deter Russia from attacking its neighbour again.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy also attended the gathering in a show of European unity following his extraordinary bust-up with Trump in the White House on Friday.
Starmer said Europe was “doubling down in our support” of Ukraine, announcing that Britain would donate a further £1.6 billion in export finance to the country so it can buy 5,000 air defence missiles to be made in Belfast.
The PM said: “We are at a crossroads in history. This is not a moment for more talk, it is time to act, time to step up and lead and unite around a new plan for a just and enduring peace.”
Declaring that any peace deal “must be backed by strength”, Starmer said: “We will go further to develop a coalition of the willing to defend a deal in Ukraine and to guarantee the peace.
“Not every nation will feel able to contribute but that can’t mean that we sit back. Instead, those willing will intensify planning now with real urgency.
“The UK is prepared to back this with boots on the ground and planes in the air, together with others. Europe must do the heavy lifting.”
He added: “I do thing the UK should step up and lead. We have done that historically as a nation and we need to do it again.”
Starmer also denied that Trump was “an unreliable ally” because of his treatment of Zelenskyy.
He said: “The US has been a reliable ally to the UK for many, many decades, and continues to be.
“There are no two countries as closely aligned as our two countries and our defence, our security and intelligence is intertwined in a way no two other countries are, so it’s an important and reliable ally for us.”
The PM said he was confident that any peace plan devised by Europe “will have US backing”.
He added: “In the end a deal will have to involve Russia, of course it will, but we can’t approach this on the basis that Russia dictates the terms of any security guarantee before we’ve even got to a deal, otherwise we won’t make any progress at all.
“But if a deal is done, it has to be a deal that is then defended, because what we have seen in the past is a cessation of the hostilities without any backup, and that was readily breached by Russia, and that is precisely the situation that I think we need to avoid this time around, which is why we’re going down this road.”
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