US Speaker Mike Johnson has suggested Volodymyr Zelenskyy might need to leave office in order for Ukraine to achieve a peace deal with Russia, as Lord Mandelson says Kyiv should commit to a ceasefire before Russia.

“Something has to change,” Mr Johnson told NBC.

“Either he needs to come to his senses and come back to the table in gratitude or someone else needs to lead the country to do that,” he added, referring to Mr Zelenskyy.

The Republican said “it’s up to the Ukrainians to figure that out”.

Meanwhile Lord Mandelson, the UK’s ambassador to the US, told ABC News: “I think that Ukraine should be the first to commit to a ceasefire and defy the Russians to follow.

“And then, as part of the unfolding plan for this negotiation, the Europeans and perhaps some other countries too have got to consider how they are going to put forces on the ground to play their part in providing enduring security and deterrence for Ukraine.”

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The remarks came two days after a disastrous meeting between the Ukrainian president and Donald Trump and his vice president JD Vance descended into a shouting match in the Oval Office.

Mr Johnson said: “What President Zelenskyy did in the White House was effectively signal to us that he’s not ready for that yet and I think that’s a great disappointment.”

The fallout left a proposed agreement between Ukraine and the US to jointly develop Ukraine’s natural resources in limbo.

The idea of Mr Zelenskyy stepping aside also came up on Friday after the Oval Office meeting, with US Republican senator Lindsey Graham saying the Ukrainian leader “either needs to resign or send somebody over that we can do business with, or he needs to change”.

Meanwhile, White House national security adviser Mike Waltz said it is not clear Mr Zelenskyy is prepared to secure lasting peace with Russia.

“We need a leader that can deal with us, eventually deal with the Russians and end this war,” Mr Waltz told CNN when asked whether Mr Trump wants Mr Zelenskyy to resign.

“If it becomes apparent that President Zelenskyy’s either personal motivations or political motivations are divergent from ending the fighting in his country, then I think we have a real issue on our hands.”

US secretary of state Marco Rubio said he had not spoken to Mr Zelenskyy since the spat on Friday.

“We’ll be ready to re-engage when they’re ready to make peace,” Mr Rubio told ABC.

But Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar told ABC she was “appalled” by the clash in the Oval Office and said she met Mr Zelenskyy before he went to the White House on Friday and he had been excited to sign an expected minerals deal.

“There is still an opening here” for a peace deal, she said.

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It comes as Sir Keir Starmer hosted a summit between Mr Zelenskyy and other European leaders in an effort to get a peace plan back on track.

The prime minister said the UK, France and Ukraine would work on a ceasefire plan to present to the US.

Sir Keir, who visited Washington on Thursday, said he believes Mr Trump does want a “lasting peace” but warned Europe is in a “moment of real fragility” and he would not trust the word of Vladimir Putin.

Mr Zelenskyy will later meet the King.

Israel says it is stopping all goods and supplies into Gaza.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office claimed Hamas was refusing to “accept the Witkoff outline for continuing the talks, which Israel agreed to”.

Under a plan put forward by US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, the first phase of the ceasefire deal would continue through Ramadan and Passover, or until 20 April.

Israel said in a statement that Mr Netanyahu “decided that starting this morning, all entry of goods and supplies into the Gaza Strip would cease”.

It added: “Israel will not allow a ceasefire without the release of our hostages.

“If Hamas continues its refusal, there will be further consequences.”

Israeli’s foreign minister said the country’s commitment to deliver goods was “for the first phase” and that “has lapsed”.

Gideon Saar added that Israel is ready for the second phase of the agreement but “not for free”.

Hamas called Israel’s decision a “cheap extortion, a war crime and a blatant attack on the [ceasefire] agreement”.

The militant group said the move “affects” the peace process, and “complicates matters and affects the negotiation process, and Hamas doesn’t respond to pressures”.

Egypt – a key mediator with the group – accused Israel of using “starvation as a weapon”.

Both sides stopped short of saying the ceasefire had ended.

Gaza ceasefire explained

The holy month of Ramadan started on Friday and is usually between 29 and 30 days. Pictures emerged from Gaza of Palestinians celebrating among the rubble.

The Jewish holiday of Passover is shorter, but this year finishes on Sunday 20 April.

The first phase of the previously agreed ceasefire expired on Saturday.

Phase one halted 15 months of fighting and saw the release of 33 Israeli hostages held in Gaza and five Thai nationals, in exchange for around 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

The extension would push back phase two of the ceasefire, which was intended to introduce talks to bring about a permanent end to the war.

Hamas said earlier on Saturday the group rejected Israel’s “formulation” of extending the first phase of the ceasefire in Gaza, but did not explicitly mention Mr Witkoff’s plan.

Both sides have previously traded accusations that the other has violated the fragile ceasefire.

Meanwhile, talks on the long-term future of Gaza are yet to seriously materialise after the UN said it would take decades to rebuild the enclave.

Israeli statement

A statement from the Israeli prime minister’s office originally published in Hebrew said that on the first day of the proposed extension, half of the hostages and bodies of the dead would be released.

It added that at the end, if an agreement on a permanent ceasefire was reached, the remaining hostages and bodies would also be released.

The statement added: “Witkoff proposed the outline for extending the ceasefire after he was impressed that at this stage there was no possibility of bridging the positions of the parties to end the war, and that additional time was needed for talks on a permanent ceasefire.”

It went on to add that Israel could return to fighting “after the 42nd day if it feels that the negotiations are ineffective”, pointing out that this was supported by the Trump administration.

It isn’t clear what dates these days correspond to.

Contention over the extension

Two Palestinian officials familiar with negotiations told Reuters that Israel refused to enter phase two of the agreement or start negotiations about it.

Instead, they said that Israel requested an extension of the first phase, conditioned on the handover of a number of hostages and bodies for each week of the extension.

Hamas, however, Reuters reported, rejected this and insisted on sticking to the original agreement and entering into the second phase, as was previously agreed.

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Before the most recent statement, an Egyptian official involved in the ceasefire talks said Hamas, Qatar and Egypt wanted to continue with the existing ceasefire deal, according to The Associated Press.

It added that they rejected Israel’s proposal to extend the ceasefire for four weeks, with hostage releases, without officially entering the second phase.

Remarkable – and relatively speaking a blessing – that the wake-up call for Britain to take defence seriously again did not come in the form of a military attack on UK soil, but instead was triggered by the verbal assault of Ukraine’s wartime leader by a sitting US president.

The lack of any physical destruction on British streets, though, should fool no one in government or wider society that the framework of security that has protected the country and its allies since the end of the Second World War is not at best cracked and at worst shattered.

Instead, check out one of the latest posts by Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s “disrupter-in-chief”.

He used his social media site X to say “I agree” with a call for the United States to leave NATO – a transatlantic alliance, and the bedrock of European security, that the new administration had until now continued to back at least in public.

It is yet another example of escalating hostility from the new Trump White House – which has sided with Russia against Ukraine, lashed out at its European partners over their values, and even suggested absorbing Canada as the 51st American state.

The alarming mood-change by a nation that is meant to be a friend surely demands an equally dramatic shift in approach by NATO’s 30 European allies and their Canadian partner.

Rather than stating the obvious – that American support can no longer be taken for granted – they should instead be actively adapting to a world in which it fundamentally no longer exists.

Make no mistake, this would be a daunting and humbling prospect – perhaps too awful even to contemplate, in particular for the UK, which has tied itself militarily so closely to the US for pretty much everything from intelligence sharing and technology to nuclear weapons.

Britain is not alone. All European militaries, as well as Canada, to a greater or lesser extent rely heavily on their more powerful American partners.

Breaking that dependency would require a rapid expansion in military capabilities and capacity across the continent, as well as a huge effort to build up the defence industrial base required to produce weapons at scale and exploit emerging technologies.

Sir Keir Starmer – who is hosting a Ukraine summit of allies on Sunday – has rightly adopted the UK’s natural position of leadership in Europe in the wake of Donald Trump’s extraordinary hostility towards Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He gave the embattled Ukrainian president a warm embrace on Saturday when the two met at Downing Street.

Britain is one of Europe’s two nuclear-armed states, a powerful voice within NATO, and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

But talking tough on defence and the need to support Ukraine as the US steps back is no longer enough in a world where hard power is the only real currency once again.

A pledge by the prime minister to increase defence spending to 2.5% of national income by 2027 and to 3% in the next parliament is of course a step in the right direction.

Yet unless it is accompanied by much greater speed and urgency coupled with a genuinely generational shift in the entire country’s approach to national security then it will go down in history as the headline-grabbing but otherwise empty gesture of a government that has forgotten what it means to be ready to fight wars.

Anneliese Dodds, who quit as international development secretary on Thursday over the prime minister’s plan to fund his increase in defence spending with a raid on the overseas aid budget, summed up the challenge well in her resignation letter.

She wrote that she supported the plan to lift the defence budget but said even 3% “may only be the start, and it will be impossible to raise the substantial resources needed just through tactical cuts to public spending”.

She added: “These are unprecedented times, when strategic decisions for the sake of our country’s security cannot be ducked.”

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Ms Dodds is right.

It is no longer good enough to treat defence, deterrence and wider national resilience as a niche subject that is delivered by an increasingly small, professional military.

Rather, it should once again be at the heart of the thinking of all government departments – from the Treasury and business to health and education – led by the prime minister, his national security adviser and the cabinet secretary.

This is not something new. It was normal during the Cold War years when, after two world wars, the whole country was acutely aware of the need to maintain costly but credible armed forces and a population that was ready to play its part in a crisis.