This is where the Sir Keir Starmer’s diplomatic skills will be sorely tested. <\/p>\n
Trump likes Starmer and listens to him, and in a month’s time Trump will be coming to the UK on a state visit. <\/p>\n
He also likes Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary-General who will be in attendance, a man who is sometimes called ‘the Trump Whisperer’. <\/p>\n
The US President appears to be less fond of President Macron and the White House was sharply critical recently of his intention to unconditionally recognise a Palestinian state at the next UN General Assembly.<\/p>\n
For a peace deal in Ukraine to have any chance of working, something has to give.<\/p>\n
European leaders have said frequently that international borders cannot be changed by force and President Zelensky has said time and time again he will not give up land and besides, Ukraine’s constitution forbids it. <\/p>\n
But Putin wants the Donbas, which his forces already control around 85 per cent of, and he has absolutely no intention of ever handing back Crimea.<\/p>\n
Yet as the former Estonian PM and now Europe’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas once said to me: victory for Ukraine in this war does not have to be exclusively about reconquering occupied land. <\/p>\n
If Ukraine can obtain the sort of Article 5-type security guarantees now being talked about, sufficient to deter any future Russian aggression and thereby safeguard its independence as a free and sovereign state, then that would be a form of victory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is where the Sir Keir Starmer’s diplomatic skills will be sorely tested. Trump likes Starmer and listens…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352956,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-352955","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115047070725491452","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}