G7 leaders strike $50bn loan for Ukraine as drones strike Russian oil refinery – live

Two Indian men recruited by the Russian army have been killed in Ukraine, India’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

Britain has imposed its first sanctions targeting vessels in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “shadow fleet” that it said was used to circumvent Western sanctions on the trade in Russian oil.

The action, part of 50 new sanctions and co-ordinated with G7 partners, also targeted suppliers of munitions, machine tools, microelectronics, and logistics to Russia’s military, including entities based in China, Israel, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey, the government said.

“Today’s action includes the UK’s first sanctions targeting vessels in Putin’s shadow fleet, used by Russia to circumvent UK and G7 sanctions and continue unfettered trade in Russian oil,” a government statement said.

Britain also sanctioned Russia’s leading financial marketplace, the Moscow Exchange, saying it had obtained a benefit from or supported the Kremlin “by carrying on business in a sector of strategic significance.”

U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich, who has been jailed for over a year in Russia on espionage charges, will stand trial in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, authorities said Thursday.

An indictment of the Wall Street Journal reporter has been finalized and his case was filed to the Sverdlovsky Regional Court in the city about 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) east of Moscow, according to Russia’s Prosecutor General’s office.

Gershkovich is accused of “gathering secret information” for the CIA about Uralvagonzavod, a facility in the Sverdlovsk region that produces and repairs military equipment, the Prosecutor General’s office said in a statement, revealing for the first time the details of the accusations against him.

G7 leaders have reached a deal to use profits from frozen Russian assets to provide around $50bn (£39bn) worth of support to Ukraine.

It came after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said he expected “important decisions” from the summit in Italy, with leaders from the UK, US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan seeking to shore up support for Kyiv as several of them face elections or political turmoil at home.

Also on Thursday, US president Joe Biden agreed to a sweeping bilateral security agreement that will see his country and Ukraine work together “to help deter and confront future aggression against the territorial integrity” of either state.

Sirens wailed and lawmakers in the Polish parliament observed a minute of silence on Wednesday to honor a young soldier who was fatally stabbed at the Polish-Belarusian border during a migration crisis that Poland says has been engineered by Russia and Belarus.

The soldier, Mateusz Sitek, was stabbed in the chest by a migrant who thrust a knife through a gap in a steel fence on May 28. He died of his wounds more than a week later, on June 6.

Sitek was laid to rest Wednesday in his home village of Nowy Lubiel in central Poland.

The most senior Ukrainian official in charge of reconstruction has resigned, bitterly complaining that his position was deliberately undermined by the Zelensky government, writes Kim Sengupta – such instability could prove deeply damaging:

NATO defense ministers gathered Thursday hoping to agree on a new plan to provide long-term security assistance and military training to Ukraine, after Hungary promised not to veto the scheme as long as it’s not forced to take part.

The ministers are meeting over two days at NATO headquarters in Brussels in the last high-level talks before a summit hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington on July 9-11, where the military organization’s leaders are expected to announce financial support for Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Western allies are trying to bolster their military support as Russian troops launch attacks along the more than 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line, taking advantage of a lengthy delay in U.S. military aid. European Union money was also held up by political infighting.

The leader of Armenia on Wednesday declared his intention to pull out of a Russia-dominated security alliance of several ex-Soviet nations as tensions rise between the two allies.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said his government will decide later when to leave the Collective Security Treaty Organization, or CSTO, a grouping that includes Russia and the former Soviet Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Amid the widening rift with Russia, Armenia earlier froze its participation in the alliance, canceled its involvement in joint military drills and snubbed CSTO summits.

President Joe Biden on Thursday announced three new measures that he said will create “a stronger foundation” for Ukraine in its bloody war against Russia: a sweeping bilateral security agreement between the United States and Ukraine, a $50 billion loan for Kyiv backed by the Group of Seven countries, and new sanctions against Russian individuals and entities.

Speaking alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Puglia, Italy, Biden said those “three major steps” would show Russian President Vladimir Putin that he cannot wait out or divide the western alliance, which will remain on Kyiv’s side “until they prevail in this war.”

The number of people forcibly displaced in the world through wars, persecution and disasters, natural and man -made, rose to a record 117.3 million last year with the situation likely to get even worse, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) has said.

Forced displacement has continued to rise in the first four months of this year, and the total of those affected is expected to reach 120 million in the near future, with no end to global strife in sight.

“These are refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced people, people being forced away by conflict, by persecution, by different and increasingly complex forms of violence,” said Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.