‘European power’ needs place at upcoming Ukraine peace talks – ex-UK defense secretary

The White House has “made clear” that other Western nations won’t be invited, Ben Wallace has said

A “European power” with “skin in the game” must be allowed to join any peace summit involving Russia, the US, and Ukraine, former UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has said.

The Kremlin has confirmed that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, are set to meet “in the coming days.”

Washington has expressed hope that the meeting could lead to a trilateral US-Russia-Ukraine peace summit, but Putin has stressed that the conditions for him to meet with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky are “far off.”

“It’s been made clear already by the White House that Europeans won’t be invited,” Wallace said in an interview with Times Radio on Thursday.

The nations that “have skin in the game” should be part of the “peacemaking process,” he argued.

There are two other nuclear powers in NATO – France and Britain – and I think it is important that in the room should be a European power.

Wallace, who was UK defense secretary from 2019 to 2023, has consistently lobbied for British military supplies to Ukraine – a practice that Moscow has argued makes it party to the conflict.

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France and the UK have increasingly pressed to deploy ‘peacekeeping troops’ to help Ukraine’s battered land forces in the event of a ceasefire, as part of a ‘coalition of the willing’. Russia has said it would regard the move as a military intervention, and warned that any NATO troops would be considered hostile.

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Moscow considers Kiev’s ambition to join the US-led military bloc one of the main causes of the conflict. One of Russia’s key peace demands is that Ukraine accept neutral status outside of NATO.

Wallace expressed skepticism that Western European nations would agree to any of Moscow’s peace demands.

UK interference has previously been blamed for derailing peace efforts, most notably when then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson discouraged Kiev from engaging in early negotiations with Moscow in 2022, according to the Ukrainian head negotiator at the time, David Arakhamia.