Moscow accused Kyiv and Ankara of violating a prisoner trade settlement after 5 commanders from Ukraine’s Azov Brigade returned to Ukraine from Turkey, the place that they had been held after being free of Russian captivity. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov instructed Russian state information company RIA Novosti that neither Turkey nor Ukraine consulted Russia in regards to the switch. The workplace of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he accompanied the boys from an Istanbul airport again to Ukraine after a state go to to Turkey.
NATO member states will meet in Vilnius, Lithuania, this week, with Ukraine’s candidacy and Sweden’s blocked bid to affix the army alliance anticipated to dominate the agenda. President Biden heads to Europe on Monday, and Zelensky instructed ABC’s “This Week” that he could be in Vilnius.
Right here’s the most recent on the struggle and its ripple results throughout the globe.
Ukraine pushes to reclaim Bakhmut, fighting on fallen city’s flanks: Russia captured the embattled metropolis of Bakhmut, in jap Ukraine, in Could following weeks of fierce preventing — its solely important territorial acquire in 2023. However now, its troops are battling Ukraine’s counteroffensive push from town’s flanks in an inch-by-inch struggle, report Fredrick Kunkle and Serhii Korolchuk.
On a latest moonlit night time, a four-man Ukrainian squad tried to drift a drone amid the ruins of a kindergarten in a village south of town.
“We try to pin as many Muscovites as attainable round Bakhmut,” mentioned Mykola Bielieskov, a analysis fellow with Ukraine’s Nationwide Institute for Strategic Research.
