A former foreign secretary has advised Rishi Sunak and other British diplomats not to take part in negotiations to halt Russia’s conflict on Ukraine.
According to Lord Owen, who served under Labour’s James Callaghan in the 1970s, every nation that participates runs the risk of being “sucked in.”
The US President Joe Biden should join Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky for negotiations since he is the negotiator who “truly matters,” he added.
His comments come as the Western allies reject a peace plan put forward by China’s President Xi Jinping, who met Mr Putin in Moscow this week.
Ukraine has demanded that Russia withdraw from its territory as a condition for fresh discussions – but the Kremlin will not agree to this.
Russia will bomb any country that detains Putin using the International Criminal Court arrest warrant, the country’s ex-president Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday.
The arrest warrant was issued after the Russian leader was accused of illegally deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine.
Russia has committed a ‘wide range’ of war crimes in Ukraine, UN inquiry finds
But not all countries are supportive, with Hungary admitting it would not arrest Putin if he entered the country.
Lord Owen, the ex-leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), said today: ‘Ukraine has had very substantive trade arrangements with China in their own right and a very large amount of Ukrainian grain was going to China.
‘So there has been this formed relationship with communist China and Ukraine over quite a long period of time. So, I think he’s going to try to bring this war to an end.’
The secretary general of Nato recently cautioned that there were ‘signs’ indicating Russia has asked for lethal aid from China.
On the prospect of peace talks to end Russia’s invasion, Lord Owen said: ‘I believe there should be no negotiation by Britain.
‘If I was asked, I would say that the Prime Minister should not talk to Putin, and nor should the Foreign Secretary talk to Sergey Lavrov.
‘And I think that we should say that the matter of negotiations should be conducted between the two who are conducting war against each other. We are not at war with Russia.’
However, he noted ‘there has to be a difference for some people’, adding: ‘If Biden decided that the time had come to speak to Putin, then he should go, as he is the de facto political negotiator that really matters.
NATO: China should not provide lethal aid to Russia
‘But I would be reluctant if I was Biden to do that, because you would be sucked in. It’s a very, very narrow line.’
Asked if there is something more Western allies could do to help Ukraine, Lord Owen said he ‘would not have ruled out sending Typhoons’ and that the delivery of tanks should be accelerated.
He said it is ‘unacceptable’ for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to say he is sending tanks to Ukraine and then ‘not doing it, delaying it’.
He added: ‘That is very dangerous. I mean, by any standard, there should be 30 or 40 Leopard tanks now, already there.’
Lord Owen served as foreign secretary from 1977 to 1979 under James Callaghan and two years later became one of the ‘Gang of Four’ who left the Labour Party to form the SDP.
Appointed as a life peer in 1992, Lord Owen sat in the House of Lords as a crossbencher until March 2014, and now sits as an ‘independent social democrat’.