Hello and welcome to NewsHare. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service

Studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks. And we're beginning with European leaders as they gather

in Paris at short notice and try to, well it almost seems as if we're watching them try to regain

their balance as the landscape shifts around them.

It's partly about the fact that the US is pushing towards a rapid peace agreement with Russia

on Ukraine, quite possibly without much input from Ukraine and certainly not from Europe.

Russian and US officials are having their first face-to-face meeting in Saudi Arabia today.

And the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, couldn't resist poking fun at the absent Europeans.

I don't know what they would be doing at the negotiating table.

If they're going to concoct some cunning ideas about freezing

the conflict, while really they mean continuing the war, then why invite them there?

A lack of formal European involvement in peace negotiations is seen as a big enough deal.

But the leaders at this summit are also having to conjure, it seems,

with immense questions about how Europe manages its security in the future and perhaps

to answer those questions in very short order. Well, those leaders have just turned up at the

Elise Palace and among them, the British Prime Minister Kyr Stama. The UK has, Mr. Sarkir said,

expressed a conditional willingness to deploy troops to Ukraine, but he said that there had to be a

permanent ceasefire agreed in order for Russia to be in a position never to invade in the future.

Unless and until we get a peace agreement, we must ensure Ukraine's in the strongest possible position.

We don't know what's going to happen next.

And we need to have realistic and credible answers to how any ceasefire, how any peace agreement will be lasting, just and enduring, because the last thing I want to see

is a pause in the fighting that simply gives Putin the chance to come again, which is why it's

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