Sir Keir Starmer will meet Donald Trump in Washington later this week.

Sir Keir Starmer has promised Volodymyr Zelensky he will make the case for safeguarding Ukraine’s sovereignty in talks with Donald Trump this week as the US President claimed a deal to resolve the conflict was “close”.

In a call with the Ukrainian president on Saturday, the Prime Minister said he would be “progressing important discussions” about Kyiv’s security on his visit to Washington, Downing Street said.

Sir Keir’s meeting with Mr Trump will be a critical moment in his leadership amid fragile relations between America and Europe after the US leader launched an extraordinary verbal attack on Mr Zelensky last week.

The US president called Ukraine’s leader a “dictator” on Wednesday and later said the British Prime Minister and French President Emmanuel Macron, both of whom will visit the White House this week, “haven’t done anything” to end the war.

Mr Trump used a wide-ranging speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) in Washington on Saturday to say he thought “we’re pretty close to a deal”.

“We better be close to a deal because that has been a horrible situation,” he said.

Mr Zelensky has said his country will not accept any outcome from talks that have taken place between Moscow and Washington since Kyiv was........

© Shropshire Star