Russia-Ukraine war live: Putin thanks China and India for support during Wagner mutiny; Nato extends Stoltenberg’s mandate for year

Vladimir Putin addresses virtual summit of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation; Jens Stoltenberg to stay in post until October 2024

Oleksiy Danilov has described recent days of battle as “fruitful” for Ukraine in terms of destroying the resources of the Russian forces. In a post to social media, the secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council described Ukraine as acting “calmly” and “wisely’ in its counteroffensive. He posted:

At this stage of active hostilities, Ukraine’s defence forces are fulfilling the number one task – the maximum destruction of manpower, equipment, fuel depots, military vehicles, command posts, artillery and air defence forces of the Russian army.

The last few days have been particularly fruitful. Now the war of destruction is equal to the war of kilometres. More destroyed means more liberated. The more effective the former, the more the latter. We are acting calmly, wisely, step by step.

This is Martin Belam taking over the live blog in London. You can contact me at martin.belam@theguardian.com.

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Tuesday briefing: How the killing of a teenager sparked fierce unrest on the streets of France

In today’s newsletter: The death of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk triggered five nights of riots in Paris and beyond – but they had been brewing for years

Sign up here for our daily newsletter, First Edition

Good morning. Apologies if this is the second time you are receiving this email – due to some technical gremlins some people received yesterday’s newsletter on Labour for a second time. Below is today’s First Edition on France.

After a tumultuous week in which the country was shaken by five nights of serious disorder, destruction and – at times – violence, the rioting has subsided and the streets are largely calm.

Palestinian territories | Israel has launched a major aerial and ground offensive into the West Bank city of Jenin, its biggest military operation in the Palestinian territory in years, in what it described as an “extensive counter-terrorism effort”. At least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 injured, 10 seriously, in the attack that began at about 1am on Monday.

Hong Kong | China has accused the UK of protecting fugitives after the British foreign secretary criticised Hong Kong’s decision to offer HK$1m bounties for the arrest of eight democracy activists based overseas. The Chinese embassy in London called on British politicians to stop using “anti-China Hong Kong disruptors to jeopardise China’s sovereignty and security”.

Fuel | The UK energy secretary has accused fuel retailers of using motorists as “cash cows”, after a consumer watchdog found that drivers were paying more for petrol and diesel than before the Covid pandemic because of “weakened” competition.

UK politics | Sue Gray was found to have apparently breached the civil service code by discussing a role with Keir Starmer without telling her Whitehall bosses, a Cabinet Office investigation has found.

D-day | Leon Gautier, the last surviving member of the French commando unit that waded ashore on D-day alongside allied troops to begin the liberation of France, died on Monday. He was 100 years old.

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US ambassador to Russia says jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in ‘good health’

Ambassador Lynne Tracey was allowed to meet the journalist in a Moscow jail in her second such visit since his arrest in March

Russia has granted the US consular access to jailed Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich after a more than two-month gap, with the US ambassador reporting him in good health.

The state department said ambassador Lynne Tracey met Gershkovich at the Lefortovo prison in Moscow on Monday, only her second such meeting with him since he was arrested on 29 March during a reporting trip in the Urals.

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Health fears over jailed former Georgia president after video appearance

Mikheil Saakashvili appears frail and emaciated on court video link, leading to concern about his treatment

Georgia’s former president Mikheil Saakashvili has appeared on television for the first time in months, looking frail and emaciated, fuelling concerns over the detained politician’s treatment.

The 55-year-old was almost unrecognisable and looked like a ghost of his former self when he appeared in a video link for a court hearing on Monday.

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Leon Gautier, last surviving French D-day commando, dies at 100

Gautier was one of 177 green berets in the Kieffer unit which stormed the Normandy beaches on 6 June 1944

Leon Gautier, the last surviving member of the French commando unit that waded ashore on D-day alongside allied troops to begin the liberation of France, died on Monday. He was 100 years old.

Gautier was one of 177 French green berets who stormed the Normandy beaches defended by Hitler’s forces in 1944.

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Ursula von der Leyen says ‘direction of travel’ is EU membership for Ukraine

European Commission head is seeking to curb Russian influence in central and eastern Europe

The EU has said it will be impossible to envisage a future for the bloc without Ukraine and Moldova as members, in part to reduce Russian influence in east and central Europe.

While other countries such as Romania and Bulgaria took 11 years to become members of the EU, joining in 2007, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, hinted the future of the new accession candidates will be swiftly decided.

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Fundraiser for police officer who killed French teenager raises €1m

Politicians on the left have criticised the collection, set up by a far-right activist, but GoFundMe has refused to take it down

A row has broken out over a collection for the family of the French police officer under investigation for shooting dead a 17-year-old that has topped more than €1m (£860,000) in donations.

A similar collection to help the family of the victim, Nahel M, killed a week ago in Nanterre outside Paris after being stopped by two motorcycle patrol officers, has collected less than €200,000.

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Russia-Ukraine war: at least 19 injured in drone attack; US ambassador meets with jailed reporter Evan Gershkovich in Moscow – as it happened

Child among people injured in attack in Sumy; Lynne Tracy visits Wall Street Journal reporter in prison after court upholds FSB request to extend his detention

In her regular operational update, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar has re-stated that Ukraine is making incremental gains in both the east and the south, and said that 37.4 sq km (14.4 sq m) of territory had been reclaimed.

On the Telegram messaging app Maliar said Ukrainian forces were advancing in the Bakhmut direction, adding that Russian forces were attacking in the Lyman, Avdiivka and Mariinka directions in the Donetsk region.

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Crowds gather at French town halls to show solidarity as protests ease

People turn out across the country to support local government after arrests on Sunday fell to 49 from 719 on Saturday

Violent protests in France over the police shooting of teenager Nahel M appeared to ease after five nights of unrest as crowds gathered at town halls across the country to show solidarity with local governments targeted in the violence.

Police made 49 arrests nationwide on Sunday, French media reported, citing the interior ministry, down significantly from 719 arrests the day before, and 1,300 on Friday.

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Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina dies after being wounded in Kramatorsk strike

Author who had been working to document Russian war crimes since the invasion was hospitalised with skull fractures after Tuesday’s missile strike

An award-winning Ukrainian writer and war crimes researcher wounded in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant last week has died, the freedom of expression group PEN has said.

Victoria Amelina, 37, was wounded when a Russian missile destroyed the Ria Pizza restaurant in the eastern city of Kramatorsk on Tuesday, killing 12 people, including four children, and wounding dozens.

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Russia-Ukraine war at a glance: what we know on day 495 of the invasion

Ukrainian and Russian troops both advancing in different areas amid ‘fierce fighting’, says Kyiv; Biden to visit UK and Finland on Nato summit trip

Ukraine has said Russian troops are advancing in four areas in the east of the country amid “fierce fighting” but reports that Kyiv’s forces are moving forward in the south. Russian troops were advancing near Avdiivka, Mariinka, Lyman and Svatove, said the deputy defence minister, Hanna Maliar. “Fierce fighting is going on everywhere,” she wrote on social media on Sunday. Russian accounts said Moscow’s forces had repelled Ukrainian attacks near villages ringing Bakhmut and in areas farther south, including the strategic hilltop town of Vuhledar.

The US president, Joe Biden, will travel to Europe in a week for a three-nation trip, including a Nato summit, focused on reinforcing the international coalition backing Ukraine amid its counteroffensive against Russia. Biden is set to depart on Sunday 9 July for Britain and then head to Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, for the meeting of Nato leaders, followed by a one-day visit to Helsinki for talks with his Nordic counterparts, the White House has said.

A top Russian propagandist has accused Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin of going “off the rails” after receiving billions in public funds, as Moscow’s new narrative takes shape after Wagner’s brief mutiny. “Prigozhin has gone off the rails because of big money,” Dmitry Kiselev, one of the main faces of the Russian propaganda machine, said on his weekly television show on Sunday. Prigozhin led his forces in a short-lived rebellion against Russia’s top military brass just over a week ago in a major embarrassment for the Kremlin.

Four civilians were injured by Russian shelling in the southern city of Kherson, the prosecutor general’s office said on Sunday, including two in a direct hit on a high-rise building. Russian forces fired on the residential area from the occupied east bank of the Dnipro River, also reportedly damaging civilian infrastructure.

Award-winning Ukrainian writer and war crimes researcher Victoria Amelina, 37, has died after being wounded in a Russian missile strike in Kramatorsk, the freedom of expression group PEN has said. The attack last Tuesday destroyed the Ria Pizza restaurant in the eastern Ukrainian city, killing another 12 people, including four children, and wounding dozens.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy paid tribute in Odesa to those serving in the navy on Ukrainian Navy Day on Sunday in a video posted on Twitter. The Ukrainian president said: “The enemy will in no way dictate its terms in the Black Sea.”

Two British peers were among 50 people who attended a party organised by the Russian ambassador to the UK at his residence in west London last month to mark the creation of a Russia independent of the Soviet Union. The Conservative Lord Balfe and crossbencher Lord Skidelsky attended the event at which the Russian envoy, Andrei Kelin, spoke and sought to justify the invasion of Ukraine, according to the Sunday Times.

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s media holding company is to shut down, the director of one of its outlets said. Patriot Media, whose most prominent outlet was the RIA FAN news site, had taken a strongly nationalist, pro-Kremlin editorial line while also providing positive coverage of Prigozhin and his Wagner group.

Poland will send 500 police officers to its border with Belarus, Poland’s interior minister, Mariusz Kamiński, has said. Warsaw earlier announced a tightening of security because of concerns over the Wagner group’s presence in Belarus.

Energy giants TotalEnergies and Shell have defended activities linked to Russia after a critical report into their trading in natural gas despite the war in Ukraine. The campaign group Global Witness said TotalEnergies was the third-biggest player in Russian liquified natural gas last year and Shell the fourth, behind two Russian companies. Both companies said on Sunday they were tied to ongoing contracts despite pulling out of Russian partnerships after Ukraine was invaded last year.

Russia has cancelled its 2023 Maks international airshow, probably over security concerns after recent uncrewed aerial vehicle attacks inside the country, according to the UK Ministry of Defence’s latest intelligence report.

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France riots: calmer night reported despite 700 arrests

Grandmother of Nahel M calls for calm as 45,000 police and gendarmes deployed in fifth night of rioting

The grandmother of a teenage boy, whose fatal shooting by police sparked five nights of rioting in France, has called for calm as authorities said the scale and intensity of the violence appeared to be waning, despite an arson attempt on a mayor’s home.

Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister, said the police deployment would be unchanged, with 45,000 officers on duty around the country, after protesters again torched cars, looted shops, damaged infrastructure and clashed with police on Saturday night.

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Ukrainian forces gradually advance on Bakhmut; four people injured after shelling in Kherson – as it happened

Eastern Command spokesperson says Ukrainian forces are ‘pressuring’ Russian troops in Donetsk Oblast; Russian shelling hits residential area. says Ukraine

Poland will send 500 police officers to its border with Belarus, the Polish minister of the interior, Mariusz Kaminski, said on Sunday, Reuters reports.

“Due to the tense situation on the border with Belarus I have decided to bolster our forces with 500 Polish police officers from preventive and counterterrorism units,” he wrote on Twitter.

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Second world war British fighter planes unearthed in Ukraine

Remains of eight Hurricanes dating back to 1940s conflict found south of Kyiv

Authorities in Ukraine have discovered the remains of eight British Hurricane fighter planes dating back to the second world war.

The aircraft, found near an unexploded bomb dating from the same conflict in a forest south of Kyiv, were sent to the Soviet Union by Britain after Nazi Germany invaded the country in 1941.

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‘Some never came back’: how Russians hunted down veterans of Donbas conflict

Exclusive: Ukrainians who fought against separatists tell of kidnap and torture by invaders; the fate of hundreds of others is a mystery

Viktor Kushyn knew Russian soldiers were after him. He sensed it from the first day of Moscow’s full-scale war on Ukraine in February last year, when Russians occupied his village in the Kharkiv region.

So when two Russian service personnel stopped him in the street one morning in May 2022, he didn’t resist. He spent the next few days locked in a cellar with other men who, like him, had fought against Russian-backed separatists between 2014 and 2022 in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

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UK to breach Iran nuclear deal with refusal to lift sanctions

Decision by UK and other European powers comes amid uncertainty over future of 2015 agreement

The UK and other European powers are expected to announce plans to breach the 2015 Iran nuclear deal for the first time when they confirm they are not going to lift sanctions on Tehran’s use of missiles this October as required in the agreement.

Donald Trump took the US out of the nuclear deal in 2018, but Germany, France and the UK remained inside the deal, even though Iran responded to the US walkout by breaching the agreed limits on the quality and quantity of enriched uranium. Iran is closer to producing weapons-grade uranium than ever before.

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Russia-Ukraine war at a glance: what we know on day 494 of the invasion

Putin’s admission of funding Wagner could open doors for war crimes trial; Zelenskiy warns of ‘serious threat’ at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant

Vladimir Putin’s admission that the Wagner group had been “fully funded” by the Russian state could make it easier for an international court to prosecute him for war crimes, experts in international law have said. In the year to May 2023 alone, Wagner reportedly received more than 86bn roubles from the state budget, or over a billion dollars.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has warned that a “serious threat” remains at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and that Russia is “technically ready” to provoke a localised explosion at the facility. Zelenskiy cited Ukrainian intelligence as the source of his information and called for greater international attention to the situation at the facility, the largest nuclear plant in Europe.

Air defence systems were engaged early on Sunday in repelling a Russian air attack on Kyiv, Ukraine’s air force said. Witnesses heard blasts resembling the sound of air defence systems hitting targets, but there was no immediate information about potential damage.

A 51-year-old man has been killed and two others injured by shelling in Mala Tokmachka, a village near the frontline in the south-eastern region of Zaporizhia, local officials said. The head of the local military administration, Yuriy Malashko, described the site as a “frontline community under merciless enemy fire”.

US president Joe Biden will host Swedish prime minister Ulf Kristersson next week to talk about transatlantic security cooperation and the war in Ukraine, the White House said. The two leaders “will review our growing security cooperation and reaffirm their view that Sweden should join Nato as soon as possible”.

Austria, a neutral country, announced its intention to join the European Sky Shield initiative, launched in 2022 by Germany against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. Austrian chancellor Karl Nehammer said the decision did not call into question the neutrality of the country but cited “a threat that has considerably worsened”. “We must and will take precautions to protect our country against the risk of drone or missile attacks,” he said.

Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez pledged the EU’s “unequivocal” support for Ukraine during a visit to Kyiv on the first day of Spain assuming presidency of the bloc. Sanchez said his visit “demonstrates a clear and unequivocal political commitment” to Ukraine’s bid to join the EU.

Ukrainian president Zelenskiy has expressed frustration over the slow deliveries of weapons and lack of clarity over pilot training by “some” western nations. “There is no schedule of training missions. I believe that some partners are dragging their feet. Why are they doing it? I don’t know,” Zelenskiy said.

Two children have been injured in the Russian shelling of a residential area in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, according to the regional governor. A nine-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy were injured and are receiving medical treatment.

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In the suburbs, too many feel France’s founding ideals don’t apply to them

Emmanuel Macron has to find a way to deal with the anger and resentment simmering in communities on the margins

At about 3am last Friday I was woken up by what sounded like gunfire. I wasn’t far wrong. From the back windows of my apartment in southern Paris I could make out fireworks being hurled at the police and hear the immediate response with “flash-balls”, the “less than lethal” weapons used by French police for riot control.

I had spent the evening following the news coverage of the violent riots that were breaking out spontaneously all over France. There were familiar images of cars and buildings on fire and heavily armed police lines – familiar at least to anyone who has lived through the past few years of angry protest in France. But what was most disturbing about these riots was the sheer scale of it all: the violence was not just contained to the banlieues of the big cities but was everywhere, including picturesque towns such as Montargis in the Loiret.

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‘We are seen as less human’: inside Marseille’s districts abandoned by the police

In 2021 Emmanuel Macron promised victims of the city’s drug crime he would help. Grieving residents tell how he failed them

Inside, Emmanuel Macron was sharing a typically polished vision of a rejuvenated, safer Marseille. Yet it was outside the spruced-up gym in the impoverished Busserine district - tensions building on the hottest day of the year – where the real story was playing out.

Little more than 12 hours before the police killing of a 17-year-old boy 500 miles north in Nanterre would convulse the country, scores of officers clutching assault rifles and bulletproof riot shields clashed with teenagers of north African descent, trading insults as officers profiled potential troublemakers.

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Euclid telescope lifts off in search of the secrets of dark universe

European Space Agency mission launches on SpaceX rocket from Florida to shed light on dark energy and dark matter

A European-built orbital satellite was launched into space on Saturday from Florida on a mission to shed new light on dark energy and dark matter, the mysterious cosmic forces scientists say account for 95% of the known universe.

The Euclid telescope, named for the ancient Greek mathematician known as the “father of geometry”, was carried in the cargo bay of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket which blasted off about 11am EDT (1500 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Space Force station. A live stream of the liftoff was shown on Nasa TV.

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