Ukraine live briefing: Turkey agrees to Sweden NATO admission; Putin met with Wagner chief after rebellion

Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Wagner Group chief Yevgeniy Prigozhin in Moscow five days after his failed mutiny, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at a news conference Monday. The three-hour meeting on June 29 between the two men — once close allies — was called by Putin and attended by other Wagner commanders as well, Peskov said. At the meeting, Putin shared his assessment of “the events of June 24,” Peskov said, referring to Wagner’s failed mutiny that took aim at Russian defense officials and threatened Putin’s grip on power. Peskov did not give any further details of Putin’s assessment.

Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.

Key developments

• “President Erdogan has agreed to forward the Accession Protocol for Sweden to the Grand National Assembly as soon as possible and work closely with the assembly to ensure ratification,” Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, said in surprise remarks late Monday after meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. Earlier in the day, Erdogan had appeared to connect progress for Sweden’s NATO bid to progress on Turkey’s stalled European Union membership push.
• Also Monday, Biden met with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at Downing Street and with King Charles III at Windsor Castle.
• Biden said that a NATO membership vote for Ukraine would be “premature” while the war with Russia is ongoing, citing disagreement among NATO members, and called for a “rational path” for Ukraine to join the bloc. To bring Ukraine into the alliance now, he said, would instantly draw NATO into the war with Russia. “I think we have to lay out a rational path for Ukraine to be able to qualify to be able to get into NATO,” he told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an interview. On Monday, Peskov reiterated Moscow’s opposition to the prospect. “Ukraine will become a threat to our country, which will require an understandable and firm response,” he said.
• Wagner commanders pledged their loyalty to Putin at their meeting with him after the June 24 rebellion, according to Peskov. “The commanders themselves presented their version of what had happened,” Peskov said. He added that Putin listened and offered them “employment options,” without specifying what they entailed and whether they were extended to Prigozhin. The Wagner chief’s future is unclear after the rebellion last month: Last week, Prigozhin returned to Russia to collect money and guns, suggesting the failure of his mutiny attempt may not have cost him all his remaining leverage.
• Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine has fundamentally altered relations between Russia and the West, Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, wrote in a Foreign Affairs article published Monday. “Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine has shattered any remaining illusions of peaceful cooperation,” he wrote. He also hailed NATO’s recent expansion to include Finland, saying: “This is a game-changer for European security and will provide an uninterrupted shield from the Baltic to the Black Sea.”

Battleground updates

• Vladimir Artyakov, the head of state-owned Russian defense enterprise Rostec, told Rossiya 24 state television that the Kinzhal hypersonic missile system is being mass-produced. Russia has boasted that the missiles cannot be intercepted. Ukraine claims to have intercepted them.
• Five people were killed in a Russian attack on the southeastern city of Orikhiv, near the front line, officials in Zaporizhzhia’s regional military administration said Monday. In a Telegram post, officials said three women and one man, all in their 40s, died when a guided Russian strike hit a residential neighborhood, injuring 11 others. Yuriy Malashko, head of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Military Administration, later said on Telegram that a fifth person was killed.
• Russia is probably straining to deal with the high number of casualties being inflicted upon its forces, according to an update from Britain’s Defense Ministry. Intelligence officials said Monday that Russia is struggling to evacuate the injured in a timely manner and failing to administer proper first aid. “Russia is almost certainly struggling with a crisis of combat medical provision,” intelligence officials said Monday on Twitter.
• Some Democratic lawmakers have raised concerns about the United States’ decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine. Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) said he had “real qualms” about the decision, and Rep. Barbara Lee (Calif.) accused the White House of crossing a line by supplying Ukraine with the munitions, whose use and transfer are widely prohibited elsewhere in the world. Sen. Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and former senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) also opposed the decision in a Washington Post opinion article on Friday.
• On Washington Post Live on Monday, Michael G. Vickers, former undersecretary of defense for intelligence under President Barack Obama, said the U.S. decision to deliver Ukraine cluster munitions was a “very good” decision for two reasons: “One, to give them more artillery, which is critical, but two, to help the counteroffensive break through Russian lines which are really dug-in with mine fields and artillery.”

Global impact

• Views of Putin are at an all-time low in some countries, while views of Zelensky are mixed, a new Pew Research Center poll of 24 countries found. A median of 87 percent of respondents had no confidence in Putin to do the right thing regarding world affairs. When asked the same question about Zelensky, about 4-in-10 said they had no confidence in his leadership. But results varied drastically among nations — confidence in Zelensky ranged from 86 percent in Sweden to 11 percent in Hungary.
• Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Twitter that he had “an important discussion” with Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, ahead of the NATO summit, and that he was looking forward to talks there on continued NATO support for Ukraine.
• Wimbledon crowds booed Belarusian tennis player Victoria Azarenka after she lost to her Ukrainian opponent, Elina Svitolina. The boos appeared to focus on the pair not shaking hands after the match, in line with the policy of Ukrainian players in protest of the war. The tennis tournament welcomed back Russian and Belarusian players this year, after banning them in 2022.
• Ten Ukrainian national police officers have traveled to Tokyo to be trained on identifying bodies of people killed in the war. The Ukrainian senior officers will work alongside and learn from Japanese officers who identified thousands of bodies after the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami of 2011, the National Police of Ukraine said on Telegram. The Japan Times reported that the officers are set to learn about mass autopsy procedures and specimen collection and DNA analysis.

Analysis from our correspondents

A fateful summit 15 years ago hangs over the NATO meeting in Vilnius: As NATO leaders convene this week in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, Ukrainian officials are demanding that their Western counterparts remember the legacy of the summit in Bucharest, Ishaan Tharoor writes. During the 2008 NATO meeting in the Romanian capital, former Soviet republics Georgia and Ukraine were offered little more than a vague commitment of entering the alliance at some point, with no established plan regarding how or when that could be achieved.

The halfhearted gesture reflected division within the West at the time. On one side, the administration of President George W. Bush, deeply unpopular abroad after the ruinous war in Iraq and eking out its final year in office, sought to offer the two countries a formal NATO “Membership Action Plan.” On the other, a clutch of Western European governments, led by Germany, believed that neither Georgia nor Ukraine were politically ready to enter the alliance and looked askance at initiatives that may “poke the bear” of the Kremlin.

Robyn Dixon contributed to this report.