Russia Ukraine war latest: Starmer says he is willing to put British troops in Ukraine; Kyiv recaptures frontline village

White House officials on Sunday pushed back against the notion that Europe has been left out of the conversation regarding a peace deal for Ukraine.

Officials said Donald Trump spoke by phone in recent days with French president Emmanuel Macron and is expected to consult prime minister Keir Starmer this week.

During his visits to Munich and Paris, vice president JD Vance held talks with Mr Macron, British foreign secretary David Lammy, German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte as well as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Now they may not like some of this sequencing that is going on in these negotiations but I have to push back on this … notion that they aren’t being consulted,” national security adviser Mike Waltz told Fox News.

“They absolutely are and at the end of the day, though, this is going to be under President Trump’s leadership that we get this war to an end,” Mr Waltz said.

Marco Rubio, who was in Israel on Sunday before heading to Saudi Arabia, said the US is taking a careful approach as it reengages with Moscow after the Biden administration’s clampdown on contacts with the Kremlin following the February 2022 invasion.

President Donald Trump’s approach to ending Russia’s war against Ukraine has left European allies and Ukrainian officials worried they are being largely sidelined by the new US administration as Washington and Moscow plan direct negotiations.

With the three-year war grinding on, Mr Trump is sending secretary of state Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz and special envoy Steve Witkoff to Saudi Arabia for talks with Russian counterparts, according to a US official who was not authorised to publicly discuss the upcoming diplomatic efforts and spoke on condition of anonymity.

It is unclear to what extent Ukrainian or European officials will be represented in discussions expected to take place in Riyadh in the coming days. The official said the United States sees negotiations as early-stage and fluid, and who ultimately ends up at the table could change.

In an exchange with reporters on Sunday, Mr Trump said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky “will be involved” in the negotiations. Mr Trump offered no further explanation.

The outreach comes after comments by top Trump advisers this past week, including vice president JD Vance, raised new concerns in Kyiv and other European capitals that the Republican administration is intent on quick resolution to the conflict with minimum input from Europe.

“Decades of the old relationship between Europe and America are ending,” Mr Zelensky said in an address on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference. “From now on, things will be different, and Europe needs to adjust to that.”

A Ukrainian drone attack on Krasnodar injured one person and damaged at least 12 houses, the governor of the southern Russia region said early this morning.

In a post on the Telegram messaging app, governor Veniamin Kondratyev called the attack “massive”, but did not provide further detail.

Russia’s Shot Telegram news channel reported that Ukraine tried to attack the Ilsky oil refinery and that drone wreckage sparked a fire there.

The report could not be independently verified.

There was no immediate comment from Ukraine. It has said in the past its attacks inside Russia target infrastructure key to Moscow’s war efforts.

The refinery, which has a capacity of around 138,000 barrels per day, has been a target of numerous Ukrainian attacks since 2023, when Kyiv stepped up its drone attacks on Russian energy infrastructure.

A world in which the United States does not support its allies will be “rather more dangerous”, former prime minister Sir John Major warned.

He said democracy is under threat and “tin-pot dictators” would be emboldened if Donald Trump rushes into a peace deal that leaves Vladimir Putin in control of Ukrainian territory.

And he said if the US “retreats towards isolation” it would leave the door open for China and Russia to wield increased influence.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the world is changing and that it’s reshaping, that it may not be reshaping in a way that’s congenial to the West and that it’s a very unsettled time indeed,” Sir John said.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to the United Arab Emirates late on Sunday as momentum grows for potential peace talks ending Moscow’s war on the country.

US president Donald Trump last week suggested he would be meeting Russian president Vladimir Putin in Saudi Arabia.

The UAE, home to Abu Dhabi and Dubai, long has been floated as a possible site for peace talks as well given the large population of Russian and Ukrainian expatriates who have flooded the country since the war began, and due to the Emirates’ work on prisoner exchanges in the past.

Mr Zelensky arrived in Abu Dhabi after attending the Munich Security Conference in Germany. Footage released by his office showed him and his wife, Olena Zelenska, being greeted by an Emirati official and honor guard at the airport late Sunday night.

Ms Zelenska has traveled to the UAE since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, but this trip is Mr Zelensky’s first to the UAE since the war began.”Our top priority is bringing even more of our people home from captivity,” Mr Zelensky’s office said in messages online.

“We will also focus on investments and economic partnership, as well as a large-scale humanitarian program.”

During the first overseas trip in his official post, Hegseth also said Wednesday that Ukraine’s NATO membership was off the table.

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After US defence secretary Pete Hegseth told Western allies on Wednesday that European security is no longer an American priority, concern over the Trump administration’s commitment to Nato is higher than ever.

Donald Trump recently suggested the US would not protect Nato allies who did not spend enough on defence, reportedly telling allies he would “encourage” Russia to attack any Nato member that failed to meet the alliance’s target of 2% of their GDP.

The future of the Western military alliance, which was formed after the Second World War to guarantee security against the Soviet Union, has never faced bigger questions.

The US is the most powerful member of Nato, spending far more on defence than any other ally and outweighing allies in its military muscle.

As a result, the US calls the shots. But those close to the Trump administration have long questioned how much Nato membership serves in America’s interest, with European allies ostensibly failing to spend as much as they should on defence.

Earlier this week, former US National Security Advisor John Bolton told Tom Swarbrick on LBC that it is “highly probable that Trump will try and withdraw the United States from NATO”.

No one can say for sure whether a president as unpredictable as Trump will pull the US out of Nato – but he will certainly make the US a far more prickly member of the alliance than it was under former presidents.

White House Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff on Sunday said he would travel to Saudi Arabia later in the day with National Security Advisor Mike Waltz for talks on how to end Russia’s war on Ukraine.

“I am going tonight,” Witkoff said of the trip in a Fox News interview. “I’ll be traveling there with the national security advisor, and we’ll be having meetings at the direction of the president, and hopefully we’ll make some really good progress.”

The upcoming talks in Saudi Arabia will be among the first high-level in-person discussions between Russian and U.S. officials in years and are meant to precede a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

David Lammy has warned that failure to deal with Russia over Ukraine would cost the UK billions, as the US said Europe would be excluded from talks over the country’s future.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, the foreign secretary said Ukraine had an “irreversible pathway towards Nato” and pointed to the approximate 7 per cent of gross domestic product that countries spent on defence in the Cold War, against the current UK rate of 2.3 per cent.

“Don’t think that not meeting the challenge now somehow saves us money down the line,” Mr Lammy said on Saturday. “If Ukraine were to fail, the costs would be considerably more.”

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Volodymyr Zelensky has warned that the risk Russia will occupy Europe is “100 per cent” if the US leaves Nato, adding intelligence showed 150,000 of Putin’s soldiers amassing in neighbouring Belarus.

The Ukrainian president issued the stark warning during an interview with NBC News, where he stressed that he trusted President Donald Trump, but would not accept any ceasefire deal conducted without Ukraine at the negotiating table.

Mr Zelensky voiced his concern that Putin was waiting for the weakening of Nato, and that the withdrawal of US military support in Europe would place his country and former Soviet bloc countries in a “difficult position”.

He told Kristen Welker: “There are risks that this can be Poland and Lithuania because we believe – we believe that Putin will wage war against Nato.”