What we learned today, Monday 26 June
With that, we’ll wrap up our live coverage of the day’s news. Thanks for joining us today.
Here’s a summary of the main news developments:
The Australian government announced a new $110m assistance package as the next round of support for Ukraine, including military vehicles, ammunition and humanitarian funding.
Anthony Albanese said the support “will make a tangible difference on the battlefield”.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton said the support for Ukraine has taken “too long and is too little”, and that Australia should provide Hawkei vehicles, something Ukraine has been publicly calling for.
Despite this call, Ukraine has praised Australia for its support, with their defence minister Oleksii Reznikov tweeting: “Ukrainian soldiers can really feel the Aussie mateship despite the distance of 15,000km.”
Speaking of the conflict more broadly, deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, said the attempted mutiny in Russia over the weekend has weakened the government and is “a crack in the edifice”.
The high court dismissed Russia’s attempt to hold on to the site of its proposed new embassy in Canberra. An hour after the ruling, a Russian official who had been squatting at the site left in a diplomatic vehicle without speaking to reporters.
Commonwealth Bank suffered a major outage, with customers unable to access their accounts, including transfers and payments, for several hours. At 4pm the bank said the issue had been resolved, but did not say what caused the lengthy outage.
Albanese says he is confident majority of Australians will vote yes to the Indigenous voice, even as Newspoll suggests support for a yes vote is slipping below 45%.
Updated
Yuriy Sak, adviser to the Ukrainian defence minister, is speaking on the ABC and said Ukraine wants Hawkeis because of the protection they provide as mobile air defence systems:
Our frontline today stretches over 900kms. The Russian aggressors have air superiority … the only thing we could have to counter it is some type of mobile air defence systems and this is what Hawkeis can be used for.
Everything we’re asking for has a very very clear military explanation to it. We’re not asking for these toys because we like wars … we’re asking for them because they are saving our lives
Updated
