Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service.

Coming to you live from our studio in central London, I'm Celia Hatton.

There were a lot of nerves before the British Prime Minister arrived in Washington

for his first meeting as leader with Donald Trump.

Kyr Starrmer was under pressure to convince a skeptical U.S. president

to commit to Ukraine and European security. Other sticky issues like potential tariffs and

differences over Gaza also hung in the air. The stakes were high, but the visit that began a couple

of hours ago seemed to begin on a positive note.

The Prime Minister gave Mr. Trump an invitation from King Charles for an unprecedented second state visit to the UK.

And Mr. Trump said the invitation was accepted.

They then held closed-door talks.

In the past half hour, the two leaders emerged to

begin a press conference. First, President Trump spoke. He told reporters that peace between

Moscow and Kiev would either be fairly soon or not at all.

Our approach is basically common sense, as I said, so many of the things that we do are

based on common sense.

If you want peace, you have to talk both sides.

As I discussed with Prime Minister Starrmer, the next step we're making is toward a very achievable ceasefire.

We hope that that can happen quickly because thousands of young people, in this case, we're not talking about Americans.

We're talking about Ukrainians and Russians are being killed every week.

Thousands.

And it's a rough battlefield. It's a flat piece of land, and the bullet

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