British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron attend commemorations marking the WWI armistice, Paris, France, 11 November 2024. Photo: EPA-EFE/MICHEL EULER / POOL

French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer are due to meet in Paris on Monday to discuss how best to persuade US President Joe Biden to lift restrictions that prevent Ukraine using US-supplied weapons to strike deep inside Russia, The Telegraph has reported.

Citing unnamed sources in the UK government, The Telegraph described the initiative as a “last-ditch attempt to thwart Donald Trump’s efforts to scale back US support for Ukraine” before the president-elect returns to the White House on 20 January following his victory in last week’s US election.

The UK government hopes that Biden will come round to allowing Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia in an attempt to secure his foreign policy legacy, a source told The Telegraph.

Another source told the newspaper that Biden was likely to sign off on additional financial aid to Kyiv during his final weeks in the White House.

While Biden and Starmer both expressed their support for Ukraine at a meeting in Washington in mid-September, neither mentioned whether Ukraine would be allowed to strike Russia with NATO-supplied long-range weapons.

In September Vladimir Putin said that the use of Western weapons to target military sites in Russia would be considered by the Kremlin to be tantamount to direct participation in the war, and threatened to meet any such escalation with a nuclear response. “Aggression against Russia by a non-nuclear state with the backing or support of a nuclear state would be considered a joint attack by both countries on Russia,” he said.

In an apparent scoop on Sunday, The Washington Post reported that the US president-elect had a phone call with Putin late last week, during which it said the two men discussed a possible peace deal to end the war. However, on Monday Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov categorically denied that Putin and Trump had spoken to each other.

During the US election campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office, citing his personal relations with both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.