Kyiv needs a peace deal, not the death trap of a ceasefire

Britain’s prime minister has no choice. In saying I do not think the US is an unreliable ally”, Sir Keir Starmer is showing that hope is winning over recent experience.

- SAM KILEY

Whether he is being diplomatic, or naive, will be put to the test when he presents a multinational plan for peace in Ukraine to Donald Trump.

Whatever the French and British-led multinational proposals are, they will have to avoid sliding into the death trap of a ceasefire.

Starmer painstakingly avoided using the dreaded term. But it’s one that would delight Vladimir Putin. And it has already been used by Trump.

“[Ukraine] didn’t want to talk about a ceasefire. A ceasefire could take place immediately,” Trump said shortly after the spectacular breakdown of his talks with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday.

Oleksandr Morezkho, chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee said, after Starmer chaired the multinational meeting, a “ceasefire would only be a delayed death for us”.

A ceasefire is not a peace treaty.

While being shouted down by JD Vance in the Oval Office, Zelensky tried to remind the US presidential team that Russia had violated multiple ceasefires. He pointed out that both Angela Merkel, then German chancellor, and Emanuel Macron, the French president, has assured him Putin would stick to ceasefire terms in late 2021 – and then invaded a few months later.

“The biggest problem is that it will be used by Putin as a tool of war. He might agree to ceasefire only when it creates conditions allowing him to destroy Ukraine maybe a little bit later,” Morekho told The Independent.