The leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Poland, on their first joint visit to Ukraine, said on Saturday that Russia would face “new and massive” sanctions on its banking and energy sectors if President Vladimir V. Putin refused to agree to a full, unconditional 30-day cease-fire.
“All of us are calling Putin out,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain said at a news conference in Kyiv, the capital, with all four leaders and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. “If he’s serious about peace, then he has a chance to show it now.”
Mr. Starmer said the European effort, which calls for a truce to begin on Monday, had been coordinated closely with the White House, which did not have any immediate comment.
The Trump administration proposed the 30-day cease-fire during talks this spring in Saudi Arabia, and Kyiv has agreed to it. President Trump has expressed repeated frustration over the failure to broker a deal. On Friday, he said on social media, “If the ceasefire is not respected, the U.S. and its partners will impose further sanctions.”
On Saturday, Keith Kellogg, the U.S. special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, said on social media that a comprehensive cease-fire for 30 days “will start the process for ending the largest and longest war in Europe since World War II.”
Before the news conference, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, released a photograph of the five leaders huddled around a phone, Mr. Sybiha said, talking with Mr. Trump.
“Ukraine and all allies are ready for a full unconditional ceasefire on land, air, and at sea for at least 30 days starting already on Monday,” Mr. Sybiha wrote on social media. “If Russia agrees and effective monitoring is ensured, a durable ceasefire and confidence-building measures can pave the way to peace negotiations.”
Before the European leaders gave their news conference on Saturday, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, dismissed the threat of new sanctions, telling the Russian broadcaster Rossiya-1 that the country was “accustomed to such pressure measures and knows how to minimize their consequences.” He had earlier said that Russia remained opposed to any cease-fire unless Western nations stopped providing military aid to Ukraine, according to the Russian news agency Tass.
The visit of the European leaders came one day after Russia’s celebration of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, during which President Vladimir V. Putin welcomed President Xi Jinping of China and other foreign dignitaries to Moscow for a military parade meant to project Russia’s power and Mr. Putin’s bid to reshape the global order on his terms.
The two events crystallized both the changing contours of the war in Ukraine and the broader geopolitical shift underway since Mr. Trump entered office. In just a few months, Mr. Trump has reversed core tenets of U.S. foreign policy, and is presiding over the weakening of the trans-Atlantic bond that helped set Europe on the path to peace after the cataclysm of World War II.
At the moment, Ukraine is caught between an emboldened Russia, buoyed by China, North Korea and Iran, and a Europe scrambling to fill the void left by the United States.
It has been more than 120 days since the United States announced a new round of military assistance to Ukraine. It remains unclear if the Trump administration plans to spend the remaining $3.85 billion that Congress has authorized for additional withdrawals from the Defense Department’s stockpiles.
Most of the pressure Washington has brought to bear to end the fighting has been directed at Kyiv, though Mr. Trump has recently shown flashes of frustration with Moscow.
Daniel Fried, a former top U.S. diplomat and fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, said there was hope that the American and European policies on Ukraine are converging but many tests remained.
“The moment of truth” will come, he said, if Mr. Putin refuses the 30-day cease-fire, raising the questions of whether United States imposes more sanctions and offers more military assistance.
If there is a cease-fire, he said, the next test may come if Russia violates the truce.
“What, then, will be the U.S. response?” he said.
Mr. Macron and Mr. Starmer, joined by the new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz and the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, started their visit to Kyiv with a solemn tribute to the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers killed in battle, laying flowers at a makeshift memorial in the capital.
The European leaders said they would discuss ways to strengthen the Ukrainian military to ensure that any future peace deal proves enduring through what they have been calling a “coalition of the willing.”
But the coming weeks will test whether European resolve and resources can match the scale of the challenge as the war’s outcome increasingly becomes Europe’s problem to solve.
Ukraine is racing to build up its domestic arms production and its European allies have increased their military assistance. Even if Russia agrees to a cease-fire, Ukraine and its allies believe that the only way to ensure an enduring peace is through military strength.
