Sky News reports on UK PM Keir Starmer's latest comments:

In a statement ahead of the call, the prime minister said: "We can't allow President Putin to play games with President Trump's deal.

"The Kremlin's complete disregard for President Trump's ceasefire proposal only serves to demonstrate that Putin is not serious about peace.

As SNL's Church Lady might say: How Convenient!

Given that we all know that the UK and other EU leaders have not been serious about peace for the last 3 years and only became serious a few weeks ago after Trump rattled their cages.

Back when the 2022 Istanbul peace talks were derailed by the West following Boris Johnson's surprise visit to Turkey to buy more wallpaper, no-one characterised this last-minute derailment as 'playing games' when a peace deal was on the table.

The truth is that in 2022 the West and the Ukrainian leadership took a massive gamble.

They gambled on provoking Russia to invade Ukraine and bet that unlimited financial support for a proxy war fought by Ukrainians, wide-ranging sanctions and a relentless media campaign portraying Putin as another Hitler would isolate Russia, bring it to its knees economically and militarily and provoke a regime change to topple Putin.

But that gamble was lost and the West has run out of cards.

And now the EU and UK gamblers have realised that it was in fact them playing a high-stakes game with the dispensable lives of Russians and Ukrainians so the time has come to deflect the game playing onto Putin and sue for peace.

All their gamble has achieved is a lot of deaths, a Russian pivot to the East, undermining of the viability of NATO and a massive hit to the EU economy by replacing cheap Russian energy with expensive US LPG.

The only upside for the gamblers is a massive boost to the EU MIC - with even Volkswagen considering switching some of its factories to the much more profitable function of producing weapons rather than kubelwagens.

As usual, Sir Keir persists in conveniently forgetting history, including his use of the phrase 'coalition of the willing' - a diplomatic joke if ever there was one given its previous use in the illegal wars in Kosovo and Iraq.

Classic double-dutch by the UK PM as he reaps what Johnson sowed.