It came as Lord Cameron, the Foreign Secretary, met Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in Kyiv, where he assured him that his forces have a right to use British-supplied weapons to strike inside Russian territory.

While Ukraine initially attempted peace talks with Russia, such as in Turkey and on the Belarusian border, Moscow has been much less eager to do so since the annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts in 2022.

Mr Zelensky has since declared peace talks with Russia under its current leadership are “impossible” and in November 2023 said he was “not ready” for talks with Moscow unless its troops withdrew from Ukraine.

Behind the scenes, Ukrainian and Western leaders accept that eventually the war will most likely end in a negotiated settlement. The crucial question is which side will have performed the strongest on the battlefield at that point, providing the most leverage.

A special Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland is due to be held in June, which Mr Zelensky has hailed as the “first real chance to start restoring a just peace”. 

A spokesman for Russia’s foreign ministry on Friday said Moscow was ready to consider “serious” proposals to settle the Ukraine conflict.

Any settlement would have to take into account the Kremlin’s security concerns, including that Ukraine must pledge to remain militarily neutral in future.

Switzerland has stressed that “a peace process without Russia is not possible”.

On Friday, Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and a staunch Putin ally, posted an expletive-laden rant on social media calling Mr Zelensky a “bastard”, “halfwit” and a “c—” over the peace conference plans.

Mr Medvedev dismissed the Swiss talks as the product of “impotent” Western elites who have “performed painful self-castration of their own potential to stop the military conflict”.

The US election this November, which could see Donald Trump return to the White House, is also a major factor in a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia being achieved.

A source close to the Trump campaign has told The Telegraph that a detailed Ukraine-Russia peace plan has been drawn up but will not yet be disclosed in any detail before his in an effort to maintain leverage.

Mr Trump will style himself as the only candidate who can end the war, with a simple “bumper-sticker” slogan, they said.

“He wants to stop the killing,” said the source. “That’s the bumper sticker: Trump will stop the killing.”