Closing summary
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, will address US military officers as part of a last-minute push to convince Congress to provide more money for weapons before funding runs out. On Tuesday, he is expected to go to Capitol Hill to meet with Joe Biden at the White House.
Vladimir Putin attended a televised flag-raising ceremony for two nuclear submarines. The Russian president travelled to Severodvinsk to view the vessels, the Krasnoyarsk and Emperor Alexander III, at the Sevmash shipbuilding yard.
Russia will hold its presidential election in four annexed regions of Ukraine, Interfax news agency quoted the country’s central election commission as saying.
Russian forces have unleashed a major offensive on Avdiivka, with 610 artillery shellings reported near the eastern Ukrainian town over the past day, according to the Ukrainian military.
Britain has said it delivered two mine-hunting ships to Ukraine. The mine hunters, originally HMS Grimsby and HMS Shoreham, were renamed Chernihiv and Cherkasy in Glasgow in June, and will help Ukraine to maintain a critical route for merchant shipping travelling across the Black Sea.
Russia’s federal security service (FSB) has said that it had cracked a network of Ukrainian agents in Crimea who were involved in attempts to assassinate pro-Russian figures, Reuters reported. The FSB also said that, overall, it had prevented 18 “terrorist attacks” this year in Crimea.
Officials have said Russia attacked Kyiv with eight long-range ballistic missiles before dawn on Monday. The strike, at about 4am, marked the first major attack on the Ukrainian capital in recent months using ballistic missiles.
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A decision to start talks on Ukraine’s EU accession is on a knife-edge after Hungary said it would not bow to mounting pressure to give the green light.
Viktor Orbán’s threat to veto the launch of negotiations is being taken seriously, with Ukraine’s foreign minister warning of “devastating consequences” for his country if the talks are blocked.
The 27 EU leaders are due to meet on Thursday and Friday and one diplomat said the mood in Brussels was increasingly bleak.
Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, who boasts about his strong ties to Vladimir Putin, has said he will block the decision on EU enlargement and potentially block continued financial support for Ukraine.
You can read the full story by the Guardian’s Brussels correspondent, Lisa O’Carroll, here:
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