Britain will not take part in Donald Trump’s signing ceremony for his Gaza Board of Peace over concerns about the inclusion of Vladimir Putin, Yvette Cooper has confirmed.
The foreign secretary said the UK will not be involved in today’s ceremony, citing unease about the Russian president “being part of something which is talking about peace”.
Sir Keir Starmer has expressed concerns about the board in recent days, with his spokesman telling reporters that the UK was “still looking at the terms”.
The Kremlin has acknowledged an invitation to the board and is “studying the details” to seek clarity of “all the nuances”, according to spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.
“We won’t be one of the signatories today, because this is about a legal treaty that raises much broader issues,” Ms Cooper told BBC Breakfast.
“And we do also have concerns about President Putin being part of something which is talking about peace when we have still not seen any signs from Putin that there will be a commitment to peace in Ukraine.”
She added: “We’re not one of the signatories today, but we will have continuing international discussions, including with our allies, including on how we work with this, and how we work with the peace process for Gaza going forward.”
The “Board of Peace” was originally laid out by Mr Trump as a small group of world leaders who would oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, but has since developed into playing a broader role.
Mr Trump extending invitations to dozens of nations and suggesting the board could soon mediate various international conflicts, akin to a pseudo-UN Security Council.
Some 35 countries had agreed to sign on to the project and 60 nations had been invited to join, a senior US administration official told reporters on Wednesday.
The US president said on Wednesday that he has “a lot of great people that want to join,” describing it as “the most prestigious board ever formed”.
So far, Norway, Sweden and France have said they will not join the board for now as tensions rise between the US and Nato over Trump’s desire to own Greenland. Italy is also set to reject the invitation, according to national paper Corriere della Sera.
French officials stressed that while they support the Gaza peace plan, they were concerned the board could seek to replace the UN as the main venue for resolving conflicts.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who was also invited to join, told media on Tuesday that it was hard for him to imagine being together with Russia on this or another board.
Executive board members include US secretary of state Marco Rubio, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, former British prime minister Tony Blair, Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan, World Bank president Ajay Banga, and Mr Trump’s deputy national security adviser Robert Gabriel.
UN officials have so far dismissed concerns that Trump is trying to side step the organisation, saying on Wednesday it is unlikely that decades of multilateral peacebuilding with the participation of more than 190 member countries could be replaced.
“The U.N. just hasn’t been very helpful. I’m a big fan of the UN’s potential, but it has never lived up to its potential,” Trump told reporters during a White House press briefing. “The UN should have settled every one of the wars that I settled. I never went to them. I never even thought to go to them.”
Despite his complaints, he added that “I believe you got to let the U.N. continue, because the potential is so great.”
Farhan Haq, UN deputy spokesperson, said: “There have been any number of organisations — regional organisations, defence alliances and others — that have coexisted with the UN over the 80 years that the U.N.’s been in existence.”
