Starmer left out of the room at G7 as Trump and Zelenskyy skip his meeting
Keir Starmer left standing outside a Ukraine meeting at the G7 summit, unsure if Trump and Zelenskyy were even in the room. Awkward doesn't cover it.
Keir Starmer got a taste of the diplomatic cold shoulder this week at the G7 summit in the French Alps. A Ukraine-focused meeting was supposed to kick off at 9am in Évian-les-Bains. It didn't.
More than 30 minutes ticked by with no sign of Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, or Emmanuel Macron. Meanwhile, Starmer stood around with the Canadian and Japanese leaders, making the kind of small talk you make when you're waiting for something that might not happen. Not exactly the scene of a prime minister commanding attention.
A Reuters camera caught the awkward moment. Starmer, visibly uncertain, turned to ask out loud: "Are they, are they having a meeting?" It wasn't hard to read between the lines. If they were meeting, he clearly wasn't part of it.
The whole thing felt like a snapshot of something bigger. Here's the British PM, supposed to be steering important conversations about Ukraine's future, and he's standing on the sidelines wondering what's going on. The three leaders who mattered — the American, the Ukrainian, and the French one — were apparently handling things without him.
This kind of thing matters more than it might seem. When you're left out of key meetings at a summit, it sends a message. It says you're not in the inner circle anymore. It says the real decisions are happening without you. For a British prime minister, that's not exactly a great look.
The G7 summit in Évian brought together the world's richest democracies to hash out major geopolitical issues. Ukraine is front and center for all of them. But when the moment came to actually sit down and talk about it, Starmer got left holding his coffee cup. He wasn't the only one getting sidelined — Canada and Japan were in the same boat — but as Britain's leader, it stung differently.
Whether it was a scheduling mix-up or something more deliberate, the optics were rough. And in international politics, optics matter almost as much as what actually gets decided in the room.
