Sir Keir Starmer will meet with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday alongside other EU leaders as Ukraine considers next steps after US peace talks.
Mr Zelensky will meet Sir Keir in Downing Street along with French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Friedrich Merz.
The meeting comes amid continued talks between Ukrainian and US officials on a Washington-backed plan to end the war. Ukraine’s negotiators were in Florida for three days last week for talks with Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
On Sunday, cabinet minister Pat McFadden said that Ukraine’s security and self-determination would be “at the heart” of the leaders’ discussions in London. He said that talks were at a “really pivotal moment”.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, who is due to step down in January, told a defence forum that a deal to end the Ukraine war was “really close” and that it now depended on resolving just two main outstanding issues.
These are the future of Ukraine’s Donbas region and the Zaporzhzhia nuclear power plant. He told Reagan National Defence Forum: “If we get those two issues settled, I think the rest of the things will work out fairly well. We’re almost there.”
However, president Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov was quoted by Russian media as saying the US would have to make “radical changes to their papers” on Ukraine. He did not clarify what changes Moscow wanted Washington to make.
Despite progress being made on peace talks, Russia continued to bombard Ukraine with drone attacks overnight into Sunday.
Missile and drone attacks killed at least three people in Ukraine, according to regional police. A man was killed in a drone attack on Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region on Saturday night, while a combined missile and drone attack on infrastructure in the central city of Kremenchuk caused power and water outages.
Kremenchuk is home to one of Ukraine’s biggest oil refineries and is an industrial hub.
Two people were also killed and seven others injured in shelling by Russian troops in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, according to the regional police.
Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov welcomed the Trump administration’s new national security strategy.
In comments published on Sunday by Russian state news agency RIA Novosti, he said the strategy was “encouraging”.
“There are statements there against confrontation and in favour of dialogue and building good relations,” he added.
The document released on Friday by the White House makes clear that the US wants to improve its relationship with Russia after years of Moscow being treated as a global pariah, and that ending the war is a core US interest to “re-establish strategic stability with Russia”.
