It is truly fantastic to be here: you genuinely feel the history, culture, warm welcome, and hospitality. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer stated this on May 4 at the 8th summit of the European Political Community taking place in Yerevan.

He noted that many summit participants are visiting Armenia for the first time, and he is among them, and thanked Armenia for the warm reception.

Starmer noted that the European Political Community summit is a very good opportunity to gather in this format, discuss, and consider the challenges facing all of us: in the economy, energy, and the sphere of illegal migration.

“But in the context of the current summit, I would like to say the following. The backdrop and overall situation have changed: we are now witnessing war on two fronts and are effectively entering the fifth year of the war in Ukraine. At the same time, the conflict surrounding Iran continues, and both of these processes affect all of us,” he said. Starmer added that the consequences of this are very tangible materially, but the impact of the wars is not only economic.

“In the United Kingdom and other countries, proxy attacks by Russia and Iran are also taking place on our streets, as well as cyberattacks. These are not distant or abstract threats — they are very real. And we, as always, stand with Volodymyr (Zelenskyy) and support him,” the British prime minister said.

The third impact of the current wars, he added, is that “some alliances we relied on in the past are no longer what we would like them to be today.”

“There is more tension within alliances than there should be, and it is very important that we, as a group of states, stand up to this together.

At the tactical level, in my view, we are working quite well. The ‘coalition of the willing’ on Ukraine has been formed and is being maintained as a group of states with a common goal — ensuring security guarantees for Ukraine.

The ‘coalition of the willing’ consists of countries that want to work together toward one common goal. There is political agreement and fairly deep strategic joint planning.

This model is the same model that we apply in other formats as well, with a somewhat different configuration of countries, but with the same goal,” Starmer said.