Britain is prepared to send off Typhoon fighter jets to police skies over Ukraine if a peacekeeping deal is made after Russia declared that it would not accept the deployment of Nato troops in the country.
Putin’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced that the Kremlin would not permit Nato troops "under any flag" as part of a potential peacekeeping agreement.
Yesterday, Russia and the US conducted talks in Riyadh to discuss ways to bring the war to an end - without any European officials at the table.
Expressing doubts that such European action would be allowed, Lavrov said: "The appearance of troops from Nato countries … under a foreign flag, the flag of the European Union or the national flag, is unacceptable."
Britain is prepared to send off Typhoon fighter jets to police skies over Ukraine after Russia declared that it would not accept the soldiers’ deployment (Stock)
GETTY
A top international defence source said that Lavrov’s position was only representative of Russia’s position after the first round of talks.
Labour ministers have searched for ways to grant security guarantees without deploying huge numbers of troops on the frontline, The Times reports.
One Whitehall source claimed that an "air policing" approach would only be possible with significant numbers of jets - as well as air defence systems for the aircrafts' protection.
Under such a mission, fleets of Typhoon jets would remain on stand-by to watch out for any incoming Russian attacks while a smaller number of European troops keep watch on the ground.
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Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and Defence Secretary John Healey
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Across the continent, Europe has expressed concerns that nations would even struggle to put together an army that is large enough to patrol the Ukrainian-Russian border - which is 700 miles long.
Following the negotiations, US secretary of state Marco Rubio insisted that nobody was being "sidelined" and that the EU must be involved during the talks in the future.
He further stated that a solution to the war must be accepted by every party involved.
Rubio said that he understood Moscow to be "willing to begin to engage in a serious process to determine how quickly and through what mechanism can an end be brought to this war".
The US President has ripped into Ukrainian president Zelenskyy for being unable to end a war "that should have never even happened"
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Meanwhile, the US President has ripped into Ukrainian president Zelenskyy for being unable to end a war "that should have never even happened".
Although he said that he liked the European leader "personally", he said: "You have leadership now that's allowed a war to go on that should have never even happened, even without the United States.
"You should have ended it – three years, you should have never started it."
