The Kremlin has hit out at a proposal by Sir Keir Starmer to send UK troops to Ukraine as part of a potential peacekeeping mission. It comes after Donald Trump doubled down on his criticisms and false claims about Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Listen to our Trump 100 podcast as you scroll.
Thursday 20 February 2025 10:31, UK
It’s hard to overstate just how dramatic the landscape has changed in Europe, our security and defence editor Deborah Haynessays, after Donald Trump’s turn to Russia on the war.
Haynes notes there is “swirling confusion being felt in capitals across Europe” after Trump held a call with Vladimir Putin and appeared to echo Russia’s talking points about the war and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“This is a crisis and the Europeans are now having to scramble,” she says.
“The UK as well is having to take up that leadership role that it has in the past adopted.
“It is doing this now unfortunately from a position of weakness, given that successive governments have cut back in defence spending.
“Now they have had this massive wake-up call – they should have had it on 24 February 2022, if not before then.
“With America now talking in a way that is incoherent for European ears – the Europeans it seems are finally responding.”
On the details of a plan to send British troops to Ukraine, Haynes says she was told it would be fewer than 30,000 troops and they would not be positioned on the frontline but around major cities near critical national infrastructure.
“These wouldn’t be peacekeeping troops – they are being described as a reassurance force to enable the public here to get back to life,” Haynes says.
She notes that as well as troops on the ground, the skies would also need to be protected and this could involve air patrol.
The coast would also need to be protected too.
Any British plan to send troops to Ukraine as part of a potential peacekeeping mission would be unacceptable for Russia, the Kremlin has said this morning.
After Sir Keir Starmer said British troops could be deployed to Ukraine as part of a peace deal, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the proposal is unacceptable.
He said it would not work for Russia because it would involve forces from a NATO member and therefore have ramifications for Russia’s own security.
“The idea of deploying troops from NATO countries to Ukraine is unacceptable for Russia,” Peskov said.
Asked about Zelenskyy’s remarks and Donald Trump, Peskov told reporters that “the rhetoric of Zelenskyy and many representatives of the Kyiv regime leaves much to be desired”.
“The fact that Zelenskyy’s rating is falling is an absolutely obvious trend,” Peskov added, repeating an attack line used against Zelenskyy by Trump.
For context: Trump has said several times that Zelenskyy has low approval ratings in Ukraine, suggesting he had just 4% approval.
The Ukrainian president’s rating is actually around 50%, similar to Trump’s.
Responding to the claims, Zelenskyy said yesterday that Trump was trapped in a “disinformation bubble”.
As Donald Trump doubles down on his accusation that Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a “dictator” for postponing elections due to the ongoing war, our US correspondents Mark Stone and James Matthews discuss how quickly a war of words appears to have shifted US foreign policy.
They also get the reaction of the UK ambassador to the US, Lord Mandelson, as well as US Senators from both sides of the aisle to Trump’s comments, and his plans for peace in Ukraine.
Sir Keir Starmer shared his willingness on Monday to consider British troops in Ukraine if a peace deal is agreed.
His announcement came as Emmanuel Macron hosted a mini summit of countries in Paris to discuss the war – at the same time as US and Russian officials met in separate talks in Saudi Arabia.
Now our security and defence editor Deborah Haynes reports that Western officials have said British and European troops could be deployed to Ukrainian cities, ports and nuclear power plants to help secure the peace after any ceasefire deal with Russia.
They have declined to give numbers on the size of any potential force but signalled it would be under 30,000 personnel.
Soldiers would not be posted close to frontline areas in the east and they would not be operating as “peacekeepers”.
Instead, the officials indicated that they would be a “reassurance” force for the public and to help encourage the return of millions of Ukrainians who fled the country because of Russia’s war.
Starmer is due to meet with Trump in the US next week.
Read Haynes’s full report here…
Kyiv and other cities across Ukraine are under regular Russian missile and drone attacks.
And last night, an explosion was witnessed in the sky over the capital as another strike took place.
Drone strikes are a nightly occurrence across Ukraine and Russia, with both sides often targeting key infrastructure facilities.
There were no reported casualties.
A Russian guided bomb killed at least one person in Ukraine’s northeastern city of Kupiansk yesterday.
Regional governor Oleh Syniehubov said Russian forces targeted a residential area of the city and rescuers retrieved the body of one resident from under rubble.
He said two people were also injured in an attack on a village south of the city.
Meanwhile, Andriy Besedin, head of Kupiansk’s military administration, told Ukrainian media outlet Espreso TV on Tuesday that the situation around the town was “very difficult and critical”.
For context: Kupiansk, east of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city, is a key logistics centre which has been hit by increasing attacks in recent months.
It was seized by Russian troops in the early weeks of their invasion but then recaptured by Ukrainian troops in a lightning offensive later that year.
But now it has come under new, intense Russian pressure.
Bernie Sanders has weighed in on Donald Trump’s false claims about the war in Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelensky.
In a clip shared on his X profile, the US senator, who ran in the Democratic presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020, said yesterday “we witnessed a sad moment in American history”, with Trump “aligning himself with the dictator of Russia”.
“Trump is showing us that he sees one of the world’s most brutal dictators as his friend and our long-time democratic allies in Europe as his enemies,” he said.
Calling out Trump’s false claim that “Ukraine started the war”, he said “that’s not true” and pointed out that Russia invaded Ukraine twice.
On Trump calling Zelenskyy a dictator he also said: “That’s not true either. Zelenskyy won 75% of the vote in free elections.”
He went on to point out that Russia held “sham elections” and there was “no freedom of speech” under Vladimir Putin’s rule.
Russia claims it has taken back more than 309 square miles of territory from Ukraine in the Kursk region of western Russia, or about 64% of what it had lost.
Top Russian general Sergei Rudskoi said his forces were advancing in all directions and Ukraine had been pushed into a defensive stance.
What happened in Kursk?
In August last year, around 1,000 Ukrainian troops penetrated several miles into Russia’s Kursk region in an attack that caught Putin’s military by surprise.
Ukraine vowed to hold on to the Russian territory it seized indefinitely.
It is likely Ukraine wants to use it as leverage in potential peace talks.
Donald Trump doubled down on his criticism of Volodymyr Zelenskyy overnight in a rambling speech to a Saudi-run investment forum in Miami.
It came after he hit out at the Ukrainian leader in a scathing post on Truth Social.
In the speech, Trump warned Zelenskyy that he “better move fast” to negotiate an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or risk not having a nation to lead.
The president accused Zelenskyy of being “a dictator without elections” and repeated many of the criticisms of Zelenskyy, who he said has done a “terrible job”.
Vladimir Putin has long pushed this narrative to delegitimise Zelenskyy, despite the Russian leader’s invasion of Ukraine preventing it from holding elections.
Trump has notably made no such criticism of Putin, who has ruled Russia since 2000 via an electoral process that scores 0/12 in Freedom House’s assessment of freedom and fairness.
Trump also repeated a false claim that the Ukrainian president has low approval ratings, and said American aid money had been misused.
The latest poll, carried out by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in early February, found 57% of Ukrainians trust Zelenskyy.
What did Trump say on Truth Social?
In a post on his social media platform, Trump said Zelenskyy had “talked the United States of America into spending $350bn, to go into a war that couldn’t be won, that never had to start”.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
“The only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle’,” Trump added.
He continued: “Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.
“In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia, something all admit only ‘TRUMP,’ and the Trump administration, can do.
He also wrote: “I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his country is shattered, and millions have unnecessarily died – And so it continues.”
Welcome back to our live coverage of the war in Ukraine.
Overnight, Donald Trump doubled down on a scathing Truth Social statement he made about Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a tech summit in Miami, escalating a row between the US and Ukraine.
The US president hit out at Zelenskyy and said he “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left”.
He also called Zelenskyy “a dictator without elections” – repeating his comments online – after the Ukrainian president accused him of living in a Russian-made “disinformation space”.
Vladimir Putin has long pushed the narrative to delegitimise Zelenskyy, despite the Russian leader’s invasion of Ukraine preventing it from holding elections.
Trump has notably made no such criticism of Putin, who has ruled Russia since 2000 via an electoral process that scores 0/12 in Freedom House’s assessment of freedom and fairness.
European leaders have backed Zelenskyy in the row, with Sir Keir Starmer telling the Ukrainian leader that he supports him.
Here are the other key things that have been happening:
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