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David Lammy, the UK foreign secretary, is expected to attend talks on Ukraine and Iran on Thursday with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and Donald Trump’s envoys Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff.
Rubio, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Witkoff, a special envoy, are due in Paris to hear European foreign ministers’ concerns about Russia amid so-far fruitless US attempts to arrange a ceasefire in Ukraine, while Britain and France are forming a “coalition of the willing” that would back the Ukrainian side in maintaining a truce.
The Telegraph and the BBC reported Lammy’s attendance. The US president’s frustration with Russia and Ukraine over the war has been growing and he has been threatening military action against Iranian nuclear facilities.
European leaders have grown more concerned as Trump has heaped pressure and criticism on Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, while instead making diplomatic gestures to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
The Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said on Monday that he hoped Trump and his administration would see that Putin was “mocking their goodwill” following Moscow’s deadly missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Sumy.
Besides Macron, the French foreign ministry said Rubio would also meet his French counterpart, Jean-Noel Barrot, to discuss Ukraine, prospects for a new Iran nuclear deal and the Middle East.
Witkoff plans to fly on to Rome for a second round of discussions on Saturday with the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, about Iran’s nuclear programme. They met for 45 minutes last Saturday in Oman. Both sides described those talks as positive while acknowledging any potential deal remained distant.
Trump said on Monday he was willing to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities if a deal was not reached. On Tuesday he held a meeting with top national security advisers at the White House focused on Iran’s nuclear programme, according to sources familiar with the encounter.
The US had not told European countries about the nuclear talks in Oman before Trump announced them, even though they hold a key card on the possible reimposition of UN sanctions on Tehran. Thursday’s talks will be a key opportunity for potential coordination between US and Europe.
Trump has restored a “maximum pressure” campaign on Tehran since February after ditching a 2015 nuclear pact between Iran and six world powers during his first term and reimposed crippling sanctions on the Islamic republic.
Trump said on Monday he believed Iran was intentionally delaying a nuclear deal with the US and that it must abandon any drive for a nuclear weapon or face a possible military strike on atomic facilities.
With Reuters
