Keir Starmer has called for countries to join “coalition of the willing” to help bring an end to the war in Ukraine.

The prime minister also revealed that the UK and France is now working on its own peace plan to present to Donald Trump.

His comments came as he prepares to host a major defence summit of European leaders on Sunday.

Appearing on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC1, the PM said: “We’ve agreed that the UK, along with France and possibly one or two others, [to work] on a plan to stop the fighting and then we’ll discuss that plan with the United States.”

Starmer described the talks as “a step in the right direction” after Friday’s Oval Office bust-up between Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

That led to the Ukrainian president leaving the White House without signing a deal which would have given America access to his country’s natural minerals in return for military support.

Starmer has already pledged to put British “boots on the ground” in Ukraine to help police any peace deal, but said the whole of Europe “needs to do more in its own defence”.

He said: “We need to increase spending, we’ve got to increase capability and we’ve got to co-ordinate more because in the Ukraine conflict we’ve seen that the co-ordination isn’t there.

“On top of that we need to be clear what a European security guarantee would look like. 

“I do acknowledge that that’s more likely to be, in the first instance, a coalition of the willing. In other words, we’ve got to find those countries in Europe that are prepared to be a bit more forward leaning.

“Rather than move at the pace of every single country in Europe, which would in the end be quite a slow pace, I do think we’ve got to get to a coalition of the willing now to move this forward.”

The PM said the UK and France were “the most advanced in the thinking on this”, which was why they were working on a peace plan to present to the US.

He added: “The more the better in this, but we need to move to a quicker, more agile way of going forward and I think that is a coalition of the willing at this stage.”