France or UK should engage with Russia over Ukraine, Finland's Stubb says

HELSINKI (Reuters) - France or Britain should take the lead in engaging with Russia about Ukraine as part of European efforts to support Kyiv, Finland's president Alexander Stubb said on Thursday.

European countries who joined a "coalition of the willing" to back Ukraine agreed at a meeting last week that at least one of their leaders should engage with Russia at some stage, Stubb told reporters in Helsinki.

"My personal preference would be that our representatives of the Coalition of the Willing would be doing that. In other words France or the United Kingdom," he said.

Finland is part of the European coalition that has vowed to continue supporting Ukraine's army, in response to European concern that the U.S. no longer represents a bulwark of support for Ukraine's three-year-old fight against Russian invasion.

Stubb said any effort to approach Russia should be closely coordinated.

Finland, which shares a 1,300-km (800-mile) border with Russia, has been a staunch supporter of Ukraine and joined the NATO military alliance in 2023 in response to Russia's 2022 invasion. Moscow at the time cast the move as a dangerous and historic mistake.

The Kremlin said earlier this week that President Vladimir Putin was open to the idea of restoring relations between Finland and Russia, which it accused Helsinki of reducing to "nearly zero" by joining NATO.

(Reporting by Anne Kauranen and Essi Lehto in Helsinki; Editing by Andrew Heavens)