Here is how things stand on Wednesday, June 25 :

Fighting

• Russian missile strikes on southeastern Ukraine killed 17 people in the city of Dnipro and injured more than 200, damaging dozens of buildings and infrastructure facilities.
• Two people were killed in a Russian attack on the city of Samara.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy named Hennadii Shapovalov as the new commander of Ukraine’s ground forces. He will also oversee military recruitment efforts overseas as part of a broader mobilisation effort.
• Russia says it intercepted dozens of drones overnight across its territory, including the Voronezh region on the border of eastern Ukraine.
• Russian forces say they captured the village of Dyliivka in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
• Zelenskyy said on X that Russia and Ukraine have not moved any closer to a ceasefire. “The Russians once again openly and absolutely cynically declared they are ‘not in the mood’ for a ceasefire. Russia wants to wage war. This means the pressure the world is applying isn’t hurting them enough yet, or they are trying very hard to keep up appearances.”

Diplomacy

• The White House said United States President Donald Trump will meet Zelenskyy during a NATO summit in The Hague this week. The meeting will be a second attempt after Zelenskyy failed to meet Trump earlier this month in Canada when the US president abruptly left a G7 summit.
• En route to the NATO summit on Tuesday, Trump declined to say whether he supported NATO’s Article 5 clause calling for collective self-defence. “Depends on your definition. There’s numerous definitions of Article 5,” he told reporters on board Air Force One, adding, “I’m committed to being their friend.”

• NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said the security bloc’s “military edge is being aggressively challenged by a rapidly rearming Russia, backed by Chinese technology and armed with Iranian and North Korean weapons” before the summit.
• NATO members are expected to support a push to raise defence spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) over the next 10 years. The move is seen as a bid to appease Trump and deter Russia.