Vladimir Putin’s top diplomat has indirectly dismissed Keir Starmer’s idea to deploy peacekeeping troops to Ukraine.

Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov attacked European leaders who are still supporting Ukraine three years after Putin launched his brutal invasion.

While US President Donald Trump has upended the united western approach and has expressed sympathy with Russia over the conflict, Europe has rallied around Kyiv, fearing that peace will only be reached on Putin’s terms.

Trump also clashed with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office last week, claiming theUkrainian President was losing the war and had no cards left to play.

Zelenskyy then joined Keir Starmer’s London summit of European leaders, where the UK PM called for a “coalition of the willing” to end the war by letting the most “forward-leaning” European countries lead the way.

“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,” Starmer said. 

He promised to put “British boots on the ground” in Ukraine if a peace deal is reached, too, to deter Putin from attacking Russia’ neighbour again.

But Lavrov, unsurprisingly, was not a huge fan of that idea.

He told Russian media that European nations “want to prop him [Zelenskyy] up with their bayonets in the form of peacekeeping units. This will mean that the root causes will not disappear.”

Moscow has excused its aggression in Ukraine – which is a land grab – by falsely claiming Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis.

Speaking on Sunday, Lavrov also accused Europe of being the crucible of “all the tragedies of the world” for the last 500 years, including colonisation, wars and crusaders.

He continued: “And now, after (former US President Joe) Biden’s term, people have come in who want to be guided by common sense. They say directly that they want to end all wars, they want peace.

Speaking to the Russian military newspaper Krasnaya Zveszda – in a transcript released by Russia’s Foreign Ministry – Lavrov also called Trump as a “pragmatist”.

Lavrov said: “Donald Trump is a pragmatist.

“His slogan is common sense. it means, as everyone can see, a shift to a different way of doing things.

“But the goal is still MAGA (Make America Great Again). This gives a lively human character to politics. That’s why it’s interesting to work with him.”