Europe is “getting ready to put itself in the driver’s seat” by taking responsibility for peace in Ukraine, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys says.
He made the remarks after the leaders of the continent’s major countries met in London, where they pledged to increase defence spending and form a coalition to ensure the implementation of a possible peace in Ukraine.
“We can say that Europe is already opening the driver’s door and getting ready to put itself in the driver’s seat, taking responsibility, not only uniting, [...] this is also good news,” the foreign minister told LRT RADIO on Monday.
He called the plan of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer “moving forward”.
“We can certainly state that Europe is uniting, we already have formats that include not only the European Union countries, but also Britain, which is not part of it, Turkey, which is a very important regional power, and this is a good momentum,” Budrys said.
Responsibility, he said, has to be realised through concrete actions, and now “there is a sense of taking responsibility for additional ones”.
“This means developing a European vision for the way forward. What the new US administration has said before is that this is our way, and you do not have a European way to propose,” the minister said.
Adding that the UK prime minister, together with other European leaders, had taken responsibility for drawing up such a plan, Budrys stressed that the key point in this process is “keeping the US in the negotiations”.
“The promise that Europe, Ukraine and the US will work together on this seems to me to be good news, well, it’s good news when you compare it to the whole emotion and situation that we saw on Friday and Saturday,” Budrys said.
UK Prime Minister Starmer held summit talks on Ukraine in London on Sunday with European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
After meeting with ten leaders, Starmer said he had agreed with the European leaders to draw up a peace plan for Ukraine, which will be presented to the United States.
Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron have said they are ready to deploy British and French troops as peacekeepers in Ukraine if a peace deal is signed.
It was also announced that Starmer and Macron were committed to leading an effort to bring together a group of willing countries that would contribute in various ways to the pursuit of peace, a “coalition of the willing”. He did not elaborate on which countries might join.
On Friday, in his first meeting with the US administration and the media, Ukrainian President Zelensky arrived at the White House and got into an intense row with US President Trump and Vice President JD Vance who accused Zelensky of being ungrateful to the US.
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