While the United States continues to negotiate on its own, the United Kingdom and France design a military mission to try to maintain peace and preserve the sovereignty of Ukraine if there is an agreement. This Saturday Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, brought together in a videoconference more than twenty leaders from countries willing to participate, including President Pedro Sánchez.
“We must be prepared to defend any agreement ourselves through a coalition of willing,” Starmer said at the beginning of the meeting, which lasted about two hours. He and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, presented options that have prepared their defense teams in recent days after several meetings with other Europeans and allies such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Military chiefs meet again next Thursday in the United Kingdom to design a more detailed operation, and Starmer and Macron, willing to bring much of the weight of any mission, they want to make the list of what resources others can put.
“There have been new commitments on the table this morning,” Starmer said at a press conference after the meeting, although he did not identify what governments these offers made and said there will be more details from Thursday, when the “operational” phase of the possible mission will be passed.
Among the call attendees of this Saturday were the Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelenski, the new Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, NATO general secretary, Mark Rutte, and representatives of the European Union in addition to the leaders of most European governments. After hours of uncertainty, the Italian Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni, also criticized with the Franco-British and eager to speak more directly with the president of the United States. After the meeting, a Meloni spokesman said that Italy “does not contemplate” participate in a possible peace mission with troops on the ground.
President Sánchez has not yet given public details of what Spain could contribute, but a spokesman stressed before the meeting the importance of “Spain being at these decision tables,” according to our reporter. José Enrique Monrosi.
“We have to continue pushing, advancing and preparing for peace, a peace that is safe and lasting,” Starmer told the participants in the call. “Sooner or later,” according to British prime minister, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, will have to “sit at the table” and “start a serious conversation.” The British words suggest that Kremlin conversations with the United States have not been negotiations so far or have not been serious. “What we see now is that it is Putin who is trying to give long,” he said.
A few hours before the meeting, Starmer also complained that Putin was “playing” not to respond to the proposal of Alto El Fuego, designed by the Europeans and presented by Ukraine to the United States. According to the British, Europeans and other allies have ways to “press” Putin “collectively” to accept a true negotiation. Starmer said that the leaders also commented at the meeting the possibility of strengthening sanctions against Russia.
Europeans expect a part of a future agreement to be a force to maintain peace. The so -called “coalition of willing” would be led by the United Kingdom and France, the only nuclear powers and those that are willing to display more troops on the ground. Another twenty countries would participate with soldiers or trainers of military, weapons and surveillance technology, in some cases with deployments in neighboring countries of Ukraine and in the Negro Sea and the Azov Sea. As Starmer repeats, to this we should add support from the United States, be it in the form of intelligence information, aircraft, antimile defense or some military reinforcement in Poland.
Become independent
Europeans, aware of the limits of their relationship with the United States of Donald Trump, try to accelerate the investment in defense and display more capacities now in Ukraine.
It is also about abandoning dependence on satellite communications of Elon Musk’s company, Starlink.
“We can intervene quickly for example with ammunition, but also with satellite communications if necessary,” said German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, after the defense meeting in Paris on Wednesday. The new German coalition government is one of the key pieces since the next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has pledged to spend more and has clearly warned that the United States is no longer an ally of trust.
The mission prepared by Starmer and Macron to present it to Trump, the only one with which Putin wants to negotiate at the moment. The president of the United States says he “passed by a lot” with that of Russia and has with him a long history of admiration and common resentments that disturbed US diplomats and military already in his first term.
Defend the agreement
For Europeans, excluded by Trump and Putin of the negotiating table, it is now, if there is an agreement for the cessation of hostilities, to “defend it.” “It has to be a peace where the agreement is defended, because we have had agreements before and have not been maintained because Russia violates them,” Starmer said before the meeting in an interview with the Podcast The News Agents.
Putin has insisted through several spokesmen that he would consider a “threat” the presence of European troops within Ukraine. “He is saying, as he said before, that he does not want security guarantees in relation to the treatment. That tells you something. If you do not intend to violate the agreement, you would not have too many problems with the guarantees for the agreement, ”Starmer explained. “His reaction reinforces my deep conviction that if the agreement with security guarantees is not defended, then he will violate him at the time he wants … to maintain peace, we must have strong security guarantees. You don’t keep peace without guarantees. ”
Concern for the United States
Europeans are concerned about how the United States is negotiating with Kremlin, in particular because it no longer has around the first mandate specialists in Russia and in the region. Trump is also surrounded by voices with a personal animosity against Ukraine, as is the case of his vice president, JD Vance, of his own son, Donald Trump Junior, and his advisor Elon Musk.
“In Trump’s first mandate there were serious experts in Russia, such as Fiona Hill, but in this current team there is no one like that,” said a European diplomatic source in the middle Politico In London. “I am worried that they do not understand how those of Putin think and that they fall into their negotiation traps.”
Fiona Hill, a specialist in the history of Russia and the Soviet, Russian and Veteran Union of the United States Government, was Trump’s Security Minister between 2017 and 2019 (then testified in the first impeachment against him). Hill, British, is now a defense advisor to the Starmer government.
The negotiator sent this week by the United States to Moscow, Steven Witkoff, is a millionaire in the real estate sector friend of Trump without special experience in diplomacy or in the region, and that the president has also appointed sent to the Middle East.
After that meeting, spokespersons from both the United States and Russia said they feel “cautiously optimistic”, but Europeans fear Trump to give in to Putin’s maximalist demands, such as leaving Ukraine without defense or forcing President Zelenski to convene elections to try to place a puppet government in kyiv.
Trump said Friday that conversations with Putin had so far been “good and productive”, despite the resistance of the Russian president even at a stop the fire of a month, and took the opportunity to disseminate a questioned statement and repeat the Kremlin on the fence of the Ukrainian troops.
The “massive fence” of Ukrainian troops is “fiction,” said Michael Kofman, a military analyst from think-tank Carnegie Endownment, to the reporter of the Guardian In kyiv Shaun Walker. A Ukrainian source admitted the removal of troops, but denied the fence, which has also been questioned by Russian military experts. What is happening, as our expert journalist in Ukraine explains here Icíar Gutiérrezis the replication of Kursk’s Ukrainian troops.
Trump attacked Ukraine again during a press conference this Friday for allegedly “getting” with his neighbor. Meanwhile, Putin thanked his efforts to “do everything possible” to improve relations between the United States and Russia.
Source: www.eldiario.es
