Starmer to lobby Italy, France and Germany over missiles for Ukraine
Keir Starmer is going into lobbying overdrive with NATO allies, to secure agreement that Ukraine can fire missiles into Russia.
He will broach the issue when he meets Georgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, during the next 24 hours.
In succeeding days he will then try to secure agreement from France’s President Macron and Germany’s Chancellor Scholz.
In Starmer’s talks with President Biden on Saturday, the US president deferred America’s green light until the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in ten days.
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US permission is required because the European Storm Shadow missile is dependent on American GPS positioning technology and other US know-how.
Ukraine’s Prime Minister Zelenskyy has been urging western leaders to give him permission to fire donated missiles over the border to knock out sites from where Russia launches drones and missiles.
Biden told Starmer he wants to hear Zelenskyy’s so called “victory” plan. Ukraine’s leader says he will brief him on this plan in and around UNGA, and also share it with presidential candidates Harris and Trump, and other NATO country leaders.
Starmer has made clear that the UNGA meeting will be the decisive moment for determining whether Zelenskyy can have the flexibility he craves on use of the missiles.
Russia’s President Putin has warned that if the UK and other nations give Ukraine that permission, he will view that as NATO declaring war on Russia - which will have consequences he says.
The stakes are high. Sources have told me that in their bilateral meeting, Biden and Starmer acknowledged the risk that Russia is supplying nuclear-weapons technology to Iran, in return for missiles that Iran has delivered to Russia.
In other words, there is a growing danger of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East infecting each other in potentially devastating ways.
Starmer is under pressure from members of the last government - including Boris Johnson and former defence secretary Ben Wallace - to allow Zelenskyy to deploy UK gifted missiles in the way he wants.
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