LONDON — On Tuesday evening, Keir Starmer tapped out two WhatsApp messages, one to Donald Trump and the other to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He congratulated them both on agreeing to a ceasefire plan between Ukraine and Russia and on restoring the vital flow of military aid and intelligence from Washington to Kyiv.
It was a brief moment of relief for the British prime minister, who has spent the past two months trying to rally allies to Kyiv’s cause. And it would almost certainly not have happened without him.
What few realised was that Starmer and one of his most trusted advisers had been working intensively behind the scenes for the past week on a draft of the ceasefire deal. Critically, they first had to persuade Trump and Zelenskyy to set aside their explosive Feb. 28 Oval Office argument and look again toward peace.
“I am pleased that we made progress,” Starmer reflected on Wednesday, speaking in the U.K. parliament. “And I’m extremely pleased that support has been put in back by the U.S. for Ukraine.”
Twelve days earlier, hopes of any sort of accord between the U.S. president and Ukraine’s leader lay in ruins.
In unprecedented scenes, Trump and his Vice President JD Vance unleashed their frustration at Zelenskyy during a televised meeting in the Oval Office. The Ukrainian leader had not shown sufficient gratitude for American help, Vance fumed.
Zelenskyy is “gambling with World War III,” Trump warned, adding: “You’re not in a good position, you don’t have the cards right now.” Zelenskyy, who was also visibly irritated, shot back: “I’m not playing cards.”
The rest of the Western world looked on in horror. European leaders and officials, clearly emotional after what seemed to them an ambush by the two Americans, piled in to support Zelenskyy. “If someone is playing World War III, his name is Vladimir Putin,” French President Emmanuel Macron declared.
The leader of Poland and Germany’s incoming chancellor also backed Ukraine’s president. European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen tweeted to Zelenskyy: “Be strong, be brave, be fearless. You are never alone.”
From Starmer, however, there was silence.
The moment must have been particularly painful for the British leader. Just hours before Zelenskyy arrived in Washington for his ill-starred summit, Starmer had been trying to woo Trump from the same seat in the Oval Office, passing the president an invitation from King Charles for an unprecedented second state visit to Britain.
Starmer’s trip had been hailed as a great success, even if it did not deliver the promise he wanted of an American military “backstop” for a future peacekeeping force in Ukraine.
The furious scene between Trump and Zelenskyy presented the prime minister with a horrible choice. He couldn’t openly criticize Trump and Vance so soon after his own White House love-in, but he still wanted to show support for Ukraine and to keep European leaders on board as he tried to act as a “bridge” between Europe and a now highly volatile America.
Instead of joining in the Twitter frenzy, Starmer took the mildest option, sending out a statement from a spokesperson of “unwavering support” for Ukraine.
In fact, Starmer had begun working privately on a solution. “His reaction was to pick up the phone, not reach for Twitter,” according to one person familiar with the situation. Starmer held calls with both Trump and Zelenskyy and started working on a plan.
“That’s his style,” the person said.
‘Win the next hour’
Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, has a mantra for handling crises.
Success in politics is not about dwelling on mistakes, McSweeney tells his colleagues. When things go wrong, as they frequently will, successful politicians don’t try to “control the past” but instead focus on the immediate future, and how to “win the next hour” and the hours and days that follow.
The morning after his bruising Oval Office encounter, Zelenksyy landed in London for a gathering of European and other leaders who would potentially form the “coalition of the willing” that Starmer and Macron want to assemble.
Ukrainian supporters had gathered outside Downing Street to welcome Zelenskyy to London in the aftermath of the White House drama. As the Ukrainian leader stepped out of his car, Starmer greeted him with a hug, conscious of how emotional Zelenskyy seemed at the cheering of the crowd.
After a one-day summit amid the chandeliers and gilded decor of Lancaster House, which doubled as a setting for Buckingham Palace in the Netflix series “The Crown,” Starmer set out what the leaders had agreed.
They had vowed to keep stocking Ukraine’s military with weapons; demanded that any permanent deal ensure the security of Ukraine, and that Kyiv be involved in negotiating it; pledged to reinforce Ukraine’s defenses to deter any future Russian attack; and promised to deploy forces to keep the peace.
Starmer went further, saying he would put British “boots on the ground and planes in the air” as part of a future peacekeeping mission.
In the days that followed, EU leaders gathered in Brussels and agreed to ramp up their military spending to levels not seen since the Cold War.
Yet despite the clear signs that Europe was trying to step up, Trump did not seem to be listening — or consulting much with his closest ally. On March 3, Trump halted the supply of military aid to Ukraine, apparently without warning Starmer in a call they shared just a few hours beforehand. Trump then banned U.S. spies from sharing intelligence on Russian activities with Kyiv.
Reports followed that Ukrainian forces were being outgunned on the battlefield in the Kursk region in western Russia, where they had taken some land, and it was feared that Ukraine would be further exposed to Russian attacks without American intelligence.
Throughout this period, Starmer was in intensive contact with Macron.
It’s a relationship that may have seemed unlikely, especially given the past tension between Britain and France over Brexit. But as the heads of Europe’s two nuclear-armed military powers, the pair have formed a bond and worked as a tag team to encourage Trump and Zelenskyy to move closer to a deal, sharing ideas and alternating between hosting meetings in Paris and London. Starmer is “doing a great job,” especially with Trump, one French official said recently.
British officials were convinced that Zelenskyy had to patch things up with Trump. Eventually, the Ukrainian leader relented. In a conciliatory letter that was seen by some as an apology, he said he was ready to work for peace under Trump’s “strong leadership” and described the White House clash as “regrettable.”
Central to the efforts to mend relations was Britain’s National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell. A veteran of Tony Blair’s 1997 to 2007 government, where he served as chief of staff, Powell has a record of handling seemingly impossible negotiations, having worked on brokering a peace accord in Northern Ireland in the 1990s.
Last week, Starmer tasked Powell with fixing the Ukraine-U.S. dispute, according to people familiar with the matter who were not authorised to speak publicly. Powell worked closely with his American counterpart Mike Waltz and kept in close contact with French and German officials.
They did not have much time: The scheduled meeting between U.S. and Ukrainian diplomats in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, March 11 would be a critical chance to move forward, perhaps the last realistic opportunity for a ceasefire.
Over the weekend, Powell traveled to Kyiv where he sat down with Zelenskyy and his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, to draft the ceasefire agreement they hoped the U.S. and Ukraine would sign this week.
The blueprint included plans for “confidence-building” measures, including an exchange of prisoners and the release of detained civilians and the return of Ukrainian children taken by Russia. Starmer was kept updated throughout the process as Powell and the American and Ukrainian teams worked on the detailed text.
On Monday, the night before the crunch talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Starmer called Trump again.
He wanted to impress on the president that Zelenskyy was truly serious about peace, and that everyone — including the U.K. — had worked hard to get to the point of having a draft deal. Starmer told Trump he wanted the Americans to resume supplies of military aid and intelligence sharing once the agreement was done.
The announcement, when it came, was the result of days of frantic diplomacy. Yet who knows how long the goodwill might last? Hours later, Trump imposed tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports, disregarding pleas from America’s traditional allies in Europe, including the U.K.
Powell will head to Washington on Friday for more talks with his American counterparts before Starmer convenes another meeting of his coalition of the willing on Saturday. Russia has not even agreed to the temporary truce yet, and the fighting is only getting worse.
There is a long way to go before a lasting peace deal is signed, but in Downing Street, Starmer’s team remains focused on trying to win the next hour.
Giorgio Leali contributed reporting from Paris.
How Starmer saved Ukraine’s ceasefire as Trump and Zelenskyy raged
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