Closing summary
Vladimir Putin sacked four deputy defence ministers and appointed a relative, Anna Tsivileva, to fill one of the vacancies. The move appears to be an attempt to install loyalists in the defence ministry.
Putin will visit North Korea this week for the first time in 24 years, the two countries said. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un extended an invitation to the Russian president during a visit to Russia’s far east last September. “At the invitation of the chairman of state affairs of the DPRK, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin will pay a friendly state visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on June 18-19,” the Kremlin said on Monday. Putin will then visit Vietnam on June 19-20.
Nine soldiers were injured in an explosion on Monday on a Czech military site used to train Ukrainian troops, the army and a hospital said. Two soldiers with moderate injuries were taken by helicopter to the University hospital in the nearby city of Olomouc, about 200 kilometres (125 miles) east of the capital Prague, the hospital’s spokesperson said.
Ukraine said Russian forces were intensifying their attacks and trying to gain more territory before Kyiv’s army received more military aid from abroad, including F-16 fighter jets. Ukrainian army chief Oleksandr Syrsky also said that Russian forces were concentrating their firepower on the Donetsk region, particularly on the Pokrovsk front.
A Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s east-central Poltava region on Monday damaged several apartment blocks and injured at least nine people, a local official said. The regional governor said more than 55,000 private and industrial consumers were left without electricity after power lines in the region were damaged in a Russian air attack.
The Kremlin said a remark by Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, that the military alliance was holding talks on deploying more nuclear weapons was an “escalation of tension”.
Thank you for following today’s latest news. This blog is closing now but you can read all our Ukraine coverage here.
Updated
Kremlin calls Nato chief's nuclear weapons remark an 'escalation of tension'
The Kremlin said a remark by Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg that the military alliance was holding talks on deploying more nuclear weapons was an “escalation of tension”.
In an interview with the Telegraph, the Nato secretary general said the alliance was in talks to deploy more nuclear weapons, taking them out of storage and placing them on standby.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Stoltenberg’s comments appeared to contradict a communique issued at a weekend conference in Switzerland that said any threat or use of nuclear weapons in the Ukraine context was inadmissible.
The talks, held at the behest of Volodymyr Zelenskiy, were billed as a “peace summit” although Moscow was not invited.
“This is nothing but another escalation of tension,” Peskov said of Stoltenberg’s comments, according to Reuters.
More on the news that Vladimir Putin sacked four of his deputy defence ministers. They are: Nikolai Pankov, Ruslan Tsalikov, Tatiana Shevtsova and Pavel Popov, according to Kremlin decrees. The Russian president appointed Anna Tsivileva, who Russian media said is the daughter of Putin’s cousin, as a deputy defence minister.
Leonid Gornin, a deputy finance minister, will be a first deputy defence minister under defence minister Andrei Belousov.
Pavel Fradkov, the son of former prime minister Mikhail Fradkov, was appointed a deputy defence minister. Oleg Savelyev was also appointed deputy defence minister.
After Putin last month appointed Belousov as defence minister and moved Sergei Shoigu to the Russian security council, the move appears to be an attempt to install loyalists in the defence ministry.
Russian navy vessels were leaving the Cuban capital Havana on Monday as planned, the state-run Ria news agency reported.
A Russian navy frigate and a nuclear-powered submarine arrived in Havana harbour last week, a stopover that the US and Cuba said posed no threat but which was widely seen as a Russian show of force.
“This is about Russia showing that it’s still capable of some level of global power projection,” a US official told a group of reporters.
Putin sacks four Russian deputy defence ministers - decree
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has sacked four deputy defence ministers and appointed his cousin, Anna Tsivileva, to fill one of the vacancies, according to Kremlin decrees. We will bring you more information on this as soon as we get it.
Updated
We reported in our opening summary that, in an interview with the Telegraph, Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance was in talks to deploy more nuclear weapons, taking them out of storage and placing them on standby.
Since publication of the article, Nato spokesperson Farah Dakhlallah has clarified Stoltenberg’s comments.
In a statement given to the Kyiv Independent, Dakhlallah said:
Nato is committed to ensuring a safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrent.
For that purpose, we have an ongoing modernisation programme to replace legacy weapons and aircraft.
Beyond that, there are no significant changes to our nuclear deterrent.
Updated
Russian attack disconnects power from 55,000 consumers in Ukraine's Poltava region
More than 55,000 private and industrial consumers were left without electricity on Monday after power lines in Ukraine’s east-central Poltava region were damaged in a Russian air attack, the regional governor said (see earlier post at 13.43 for more details).
Nine troops injured in Czech military area blast, the army says
Nine soldiers were injured in an explosion on Monday on a Czech military site used to train Ukrainian troops, the army and a hospital said.
Two soldiers with moderate injuries were taken by helicopter to the University hospital in the nearby city of Olomouc, about 200 kilometres (125 miles) east of the capital Prague, the hospital’s spokesperson Adam Fritscher said.
“Six were transported to an army hospital in Olomouc by ambulance vans and one was treated on the site,” he told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Libava, just east of Olomouc, is where the Czech army has been training Ukrainian soldiers since late 2022. But military police spokesperson Katerina Mlynkova told AFP the injured “were not foreigners”.
The army said on X that “unspecified ammunition had exploded” without giving any further details.
Řešíme vážnou nehodu ve vojenském výcvikovém prostoru Libavá, kde vybuchla zatím blíže neurčená munice. Na místě jsou bohužel zranění. Snažíme se poskytnout co nejrychlejší pomoc, zasahuje vrtulník záchranné služby. Událost řeší Vojenská policie.
— Armáda ČR (@ArmadaCR) June 17, 2024
Updated
A Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s east-central Poltava region on Monday damaged several apartment blocks and injured at least nine people, a local official said.
According to preliminary information, there were no fatalities, regional governor Filip Pronin said in a video address from the site posted on Telegram. Ukraine’s air force announced a missile alert for the region.
Ukraine are about to kick off their Euros football tournament with an opening match against Romania. You can follow the action here.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has posted a message on X in the wake of the Ukraine peace summit, in which world leaders failed to sign up to a joint communique. The Ukrainian president did not mention the summit but thanked “everyone standing up for Ukraine” and those who are “resisting Russian pressure”.
Everyone who has defended their freedom, their rights, their independence, and dignity also strengthens the freedom of those around them.
Freedom always has the ability to grow stronger, spreading from one person to another, and the only way freedom can advance is through the courage of people.
I thank everyone standing up for Ukraine, resisting Russian pressure, everyone who is working and helping, and who, in these days and throughout the whole time of this war, does not forget Ukraine and Ukrainians, our struggle and the importance of protecting human life.
Everyone who has defended their freedom, their rights, their independence, and dignity also strengthens the freedom of those around them.
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) June 17, 2024
Freedom always has the ability to grow stronger, spreading from one person to another, and the only way freedom can advance is through the… pic.twitter.com/nxzu1D8ROH
Putin to visit North Korea from 18-19 June, state news agency reports
Vladimir Putin will pay a state visit to North Korea from 18 June to 19 June, at the invitation of the country’s leader Kim Jong-un, North Korea’ state news agency KCNA confirmed on Monday.
North Korea appears to be preparing to welcome Putin, who has embraced the North Korean leader as a key ally since Russia became the target of sanctions and international condemnation over its February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Civilian aircraft have been cleared from Pyongyang’s airport and there are signs of preparations for a possible parade in Kim Il-sung Square, according to reports, which have not been independently verified by the Guardian.
North Korea has been accused of supplying ballistic missiles and hundreds of thousands of artillery shells to the Russian government for its war in Ukraine since Vladimir Putin met with Kim Jong-un in Russia’s far east last year.
Russia and North Korea may sign a partnership agreement, whose content would need to include security issues, during Putin’s visit, Russia state news agency Ria quoted a Kremlin aide as saying.
Updated
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, will visit Vietnam on June 19-20, Vietnamese state media said on Monday.
Putin was invited by Vietnam’s Communist party chief Nguyen Phu Trong, Voice of Vietnam reported. There is speculation that Putin will visit North Korea, for the first time since 2000, in the coming days (see earlier post at 10.08 for more details).
We have more comments from the daily briefing with journalists attended by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.
He was asked about the Ukraine peace summit, held in Switzerland over the weekend, during which western powers and their allies denounced Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine but failed to persuade major non-aligned states to join their final statement.
Peskov was pressed on whether the fact that countries such as Hungary, Serbia and Turkey had taken part in the meeting and signed the statement would spoil Russia’s relations with them.
He replied:
No, it won’t spoil them. We will, of course, take into account the position that these countries have taken, this is important to us and we will continue to explain our reasoning to them.
Many of them, and this was a common point of view on this event, confirmed their understanding of the absence of prospects for any serious, substantive discussions without the presence of our country … If we talk about the overall effectiveness of this meeting, it is close to zero.
The Kremlin said on Monday that a Kyiv-led international peace summit on Ukraine that it was not invited to produced “zero” results.
Key regional powers including Brazil, India, South Africa and Saudi Arabia failed to sign up to a joint communique issued at the end of the conference in which more than 80 countries and international organisations endorsed its territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s invasion (you can read our full report on the communique here).
“If we talk about the results of this meeting, then they come down to zero,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
“Many countries understood the lack of perspective of any serious discussion without the presence of our country.”
He said Vladimir Putin was “still open to dialogue and serious discussion”.
Before the summit in Switzerland this weekend, Putin demanded that Ukrainian troops leave four eastern Ukrainian regions that are partially occupied by his troops. In another diplomatic non-starter for Kyiv, the Russian president also called on Ukraine to abandon plans to join Nato.
Russia trying to 'maximise depletion of our troops' before military aid arrives from abroad, Ukrainian army chief says
Ukraine has said Russian forces were intensifying their attacks and trying to gain more territory before Kyiv’s army received more military aid from abroad, including F-16 fighter jets.
Ukrainian army chief Oleksandr Syrsky said:
The enemy is well aware that as a result of the gradual receipt of a significant amount of weapons and military equipment from our partners, and the arrival of the first F-16s, which will strengthen our air defence, time will play in our favour and its chances of success will decrease.
He added in a statement on social media:
Therefore, the command of Russia’s troops is currently making every effort to increase the intensity and expand the geography of hostilities in order to maximise the depletion of our troops, disrupt the training of reserves and prevent the transition to active offensive actions.
Syrsky said Russian forces were concentrating their firepower on the Donetsk region, particularly on the Pokrovsk front.
Moscow’s forces there are closing in on a key transit artery and supply route linking civilian hubs in the north of the industrial territory to towns further south.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said this weekend at the peace summit in Switzerland that current levels of military aid from abroad were still insufficient and that deliveries were arriving late.
He has appealed to allies abroad to speed up deliveries of dozens of promised F-16 fighter jets and called on western countries to send more air defence batteries.
Updated
Latvia has already dispatched the first batch of drones to Ukraine and is preparing a second one, Latvia’s defence minister, Andris Spruds, told the Ukrainian news outlet Armiyinform.
In February, the UK and Latvia announced that they would lead the new Drone Capability Coalition, with the aim of quickly supplying Ukraine with tens of thousands of drones, which have become a crucial capability on Ukrainian battlefields.
Spruds said in May that the Latvian government would invest about €20m (£16.9m) in the drone coalition this year and a similar amount to the development to his country’s own drone capabilities.
On the sidelines of the Nato ministerial meeting in Brussels, he told Armyinform:
Latvia announced a plan and commitment to contribute €20m this year. Along with this, when we count those countries that have already made commitments it is more than €500m. More precisely: €549m has already been promised by the member states and partners within the framework of the drone coalition.
So the next step is to use that funding effectively, and we’re doing that on several levels.
One of the first levels is national procurement. Latvia has already organised a batch of drones and they have already been sent. Now we are already collecting the second batch of drones, which should soon be sent to Ukraine.
Updated
Dan Sabbagh is the Guardian’s defence and security editor
Global spending on nuclear weapons is estimated to have increased by 13% to a record $91.4bn during 2023, according to calculations from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican) pressure group.
The new total, which is up $10.7bn from the previous year, is driven largely by sharply increased defence budgets in the US, at a time of wider geopolitical uncertainty caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war.
All nine of the world’s nuclear armed nations are spending more, Ican added, with China judged to be the second largest spender with a budget of $11.9bn – though Beijing’s total is well below the $51.5bn attributed to the US.
Russia is the third largest spender, at $8.3bn, followed by the UK ($8.1bn) and France ($6.1bn), although estimates for authoritarian states or the three countries with undeclared nuclear programmes (India, Pakistan and Israel) are all complicated by a lack of transparency.
Susy Snyder, one of the author’s of the research, warned that nuclear states are “on course to be spending $100bn a year on nuclear weapons” and argued that the money could be used on environmental and social programmes instead.
Vladimir Putin’s planned visit to North Korea has been well prepared and will bring good results, foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin was quoted by state news agency Tass as saying on Monday.
Putin, who has developed closer relations with North Korea since the start of the war, is expected to visit the country shortly (exact dates have not been confirmed, though South Korean sources have suggested to the BBC it could be as soon as Tuesday).
During the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s weeklong trip to Russia last September, the two leaders are believed to have agreed that North Korea would receive Russian help with its space programme in return for providing Russia with armaments for the war in Ukraine, in violation of UN resolutions.
South Korean media said Putin’s trip could be timed to coincide with talks in Seoul this week between South Korean and Chinese foreign and defence officials. The last time Putin visited North Korea on a presidential trip was in 2000, when he met Kim’s late father, Kim Jong-il.
Emergency blackouts will intensify over coming weeks, warns Ukrainian energy official
A senior Ukrainian energy official has warned that scheduled power outages and emergency blackouts will intensify over the coming weeks, after a wave of Russian attacks crippled Ukrainian electricity generation.
“Over the next few weeks, the situation will be much tougher than it is today,” the head of national grid operator Ukrenergo, Volodymyr Kydrytsky, said in an interview broadcast on state media on Sunday evening.
He said periods during which Ukrainians might not have power were likely to be extended by up to 12 hours a day and that outages could become more “stringent”.
“This situation will continue until the end of July,” Kydrytsky said, adding that scheduled outages could also be imposed during peak consumption periods and be “quite serious”.
Russia renewed a campaign of aerial attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities in March, which Kyiv says has knocked out half of its power generating capacity and forced Ukraine to introduce rolling blackouts in the capital and across the country.
Lengthy summer power cuts, as well as domestic price increases, are already afflicting Ukraine, with state agencies forced to cut energy use, adding urgency to the calls to boost air defences.
Ukraine's security service says it has destroyed more than 1,000 Russian tanks during the war
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said it had destroyed 1,006 Russian tanks since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
It said most were destroyed in fierce fighting in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, adding that Russian soldiers often tried to break through the defending positions of Ukrainian troops using heavy armoured vehicles.
In a Telegram post, the SBU wrote:
The maximum arsenal of armour-piercing weapons and unmanned systems (drones) was used against enemy tanks.
A large number of Russian armoured vehicles were hit at the initial stages of the offensive – before they went out to storm Ukrainian positions. Some of the tanks were destroyed along with their crews.
The SBU, side by side with other units of the defence forces of Ukraine, continues to “minus” the occupation groups of the Russian federation in order to bring our victory closer.
These claims have not yet been independently verified by the Guardian.
Updated
A building was destroyed after Russian troops attacked a children’s recreation facility in the Shevchenkiv district of Kharkiv, the mayor of the city, Igor Terekhov, said last night. No casualties were reported.
Speaking at the end of the two-day Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, yesterday suggested the military situation had “stabilised” in Kharkiv, the north-eastern region subject to fierce bombardment from advancing Russian forces.
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the war in Ukraine. The time has just gone past 10:45am in Kyiv.
Nato is in talks to deploy more nuclear weapons, taking them out of storage and placing them on standby, the alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said as Russia continues to threaten the use of nuclear weapons.
Stoltenberg told the Telegraph that there were live consultations between members to use transparency around its nuclear arsenal as a deterrent.
He said:
I won’t go into operational details about how many nuclear warheads should be operational and which should be stored, but we need to consult on these issues. That’s exactly what we’re doing.
Transparency helps to communicate the direct message that we, of course, are a nuclear alliance.
Nato’s aim is, of course, a world without nuclear weapons, but as long as nuclear weapons exist, we will remain a nuclear alliance, because a world where Russia, China and North Korea have nuclear weapons, and Nato does not, is a more dangerous world.
Last week, Stoltenberg said that nuclear weapons were Nato’s “ultimate security guarantee” and a means to preserve peace.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, frequently evoked Moscow’s nuclear arsenal in the early days of its invasion of Ukraine, repeatedly pledging to use all means necessary to defend Russia.
He later seemed to moderate his rhetoric, reportedly after Chinese officials persuaded him to abandon his nuclear threats, but he recently warned Nato countries they risked provoking a nuclear war if they deployed troops to Ukraine.
In other developments:
Russia will hold the espionage trial of detained US reporter Evan Gershkovich behind closed doors later this month, a court in the city of Ekaterinburg has said. Gershkovich, 32, was detained by the Federal Security Service (FSB) on 29 March 2023, in a steak house in Ekaterinburg on charges of espionage that carry up to 20 years in prison. Gershkovich, the first American journalist to be detained on spy charges in Russia since the cold war, denies the charges. The first hearing is scheduled for 26 June, the Sverdlovsk Regional Court said.
More than 80 countries and international organisations have endorsed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s invasion in a joint communique issued at the end of a peace conference in Switzerland. The final statement of the summit in Bürgenstock said the UN charter, the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all states “can and will serve as a basis in achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine”. It called for Ukraine’s control over the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and its Azov Sea ports to be restored.
Russia on Sunday claimed its troops had captured a village in southern Ukraine, continuing its progress on the frontline against a Ukrainian army lacking troops and ammunition. “Units of the eastern forces have liberated the settlement of Zagrine in the Zaporizhzhia region and occupied more favourable positions,” the Russian defence ministry said in its daily report. Earlier in the week, it claimed the capture of three villages in Ukraine’s east, south-east and north-east.
The Russian army is suffering heavy losses in its Kharkiv offensive, a Russian soldier has claimed. Anton Andreev, a Russian soldier from the fifth company of the 1009th regiment, said his unit had been decimated, with only 12 out of 100 soldiers still alive as they came under constant Ukrainian fire and drones in Vovchansk, a prime target of Russia’s advances. “We are sent under machine guns, under drones in daylight, like meat,” he said in a clip, which was first published by the Russian outlet Astra and verified by the Guardian.
A Russian journalist was killed in a drone attack in eastern Ukraine two days after the death of another correspondent near the frontline. “Our correspondent Nikita Tsitsagi was killed during an attack by Ukrainian army drones,” his news organisation, News.Ru, posted on Telegram on Sunday.
Vladimir Putin may be permitted to attend a potential second global peace summit, despite an international criminal court arrest warrant issued against him, Swiss President Viola Amherd told the media.
Updated
