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”.
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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.
