France and Britain are proposing a partial one-month truce between Russia and Ukraine that would not cover ground fighting, French President Emmanuel Macron told the daily newspaper Le Figaro on Sunday.However, Macron said the truce would cover air, sea and energy infrastructure attacks."In the event of a ceasefire, it would be very difficult to verify (fighting) along the front was being respected," Macron told Le Figaro, adding that the front line was equivalent to the distance between Paris and Budapest.Macron spoke to Le Figaro as he flew to London for a meeting with European leaders, convened by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to advance efforts at drawing up a Ukraine peace plan.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Sunday that a focus for allies will be to ensure that Ukraine has a strong army when the war there is over so that it can defend itself against any future aggression."The basis of everything will be a strong army," Scholz told journalists after a meeting of European leaders in London.

An influential Russian parliamentarian dismissed a summit of European leaders in London on Sunday for producing no plan to settle the war in Ukraine and said Kyiv's only hope for the future was an improvement in ties between Moscow and Washington.Konstantin Kosachev, writing on the Telegram messaging app, derided the outcome of the London meeting as "a desperate attempt to pass off as success the failure of a 10-year policy of inciting Ukraine towards Russia by the same Great Britain and, until recently, the United States.""Europe has no plan," wrote Kosachev, head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Russia's upper house of parliament."And if Ukraine should count on something, it can only be on progress (if there is any to come) in Russian-American relations."He said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who hosted the meeting, "cannot fail to understand this."