It’s decision time for Keir Starmer over Zelenskyy Trump and Ukraine – can he make a right choice for once?

He cut the budget for foreign aid in order to boost defence – so he could potentially send troops to Ukraine in a pan-European peacekeeping force… and his International Aid Minister resigned out of principle.

He kowtowed to US President Trump because he thought appeasement was the way to get what he wants from America – and now stands in the shadow of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who stood up against Trump’s bullying and made the President look like a two-bit gangster.

Now the same President Zelenskyy is in the UK, here for a summit of European leaders who must decide what they will do in a situation that he has made infinitely more precarious for them.

Starmer was set to meet him before the summit. What will he say, and what will he ask Mr Zelenskyy to do, in order to keep the peace process moving forward?

The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg reckons he must seriously reconsider his appraisal of Donald Trump as an ally:

Sir Keir has some difficult questions to ponder. Does he strive to get his new diplomatic friend at the White House back on board? Or is the new reality that the US just can’t be relied on, that the animosity between Trump and Zelensky runs too deep?

If America’s out, does he push European allies to join the UK and France in offering troops that could guarantee a peace deal – the “reassurance force” plan we talked about last week.

Is it even feasible for Europe to support Ukraine on its own?

The irony is that until last night’s drama, conventional wisdom in political and diplomatic circles was that slowly but surely, the direction of travel was towards a deal to end the war.

[But] the version of [the] Trump administration we saw in the Oval Office last night does not portray a reliable partner.

The prime minister is now faced with a decision not just on what to do, but who he can trust.

Of course Trump is not likely to be out; he wants Ukraine’s rare minerals and he wants to keep them out of the hands of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

BBC political editor Chris Mason agrees that Trump is the weak link here:

The European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said that it had “become clear that the free world needs a new leader. It is up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.”

But that is the crux of this. Is Europe capable of that?

At the heart of the UK and others’ request of America is that the White House provides a security guarantee to Ukraine under any peace deal.

The UK wants that to amount to air cover. This would be a big ask of any president at any time, with the danger of conflict escalating with Russia.

But it is a colossal ask of a president who has made it abundantly clear he has no appetite whatsoever for American foreign military adventures.

Trump won’t like it if the nations he expects to be his allies suddenly decide that he doesn’t measure up and the free world needs a new leader – and Starmer won’t like it if he’s not chosen for the role.

But he finds himself between a rock and a hard place now. With Trump relying on jaw-jaw rather than war-war, and Europe without the military muscle to achieve much without the US, what can his summit hope to achieve?

Trump mentioned World War Three. If that’s what it comes to, then the UK will find itself as unprepared as it was on the eve of the last one.

And while Mr Zelenskyy has been compared with Winston Churchill, we know that Starmer isn’t anything like as capable a leader.

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