​Ukrainian forces are continuing their campaign to retake Russian-controlled territories in the country’s southeast, as Volodymyr Zelenskyi said his country’s military had “seized the initiative” after some slowdown in attacks. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said they had a phone conversation to discuss this week’s NATO summit and Kyiv’s counteroffensive.

Ukrainian war. Day 502. LIVETEXT:

07:56 Talks between Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan remain the only hope for an extension of the Black Sea grain deal, which expires next week, Russia’s RIA news agency reported on Monday.

Citing an anonymous source familiar with the progress of the negotiations, the RIA said there was “no optimism” about the extension of the deal, a position Moscow has often repeated in recent weeks.

“Our experience shows that it is the negotiations between the two leaders that can change the situation, and the current difficult period is no exception. To date, this remains the only hope,” said a source quoted by RIA.

07:49 Joe Biden said that Ukraine is “not ready” to join NATO, speaking on the eve of the two-day summit of the leaders of the military alliance in Vilnius.

In a speech on CNN, the US president said that NATO should “establish a rational path” for Kyiv to join the alliance, but that it will take some time for the country to fulfill “all the conditions, from democratization to everything.” a number of other aspects”.

After talks with his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda, Zelensky said he hoped for the “best possible result” from the summit. Zelenskyy said he does not expect Ukraine to actually join NATO before the end of the war, but hopes the summit will give a “clear signal” of Ukraine’s intention to join the alliance.

07:08Russian Embassy in the USA: By agreeing to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, the White House actually admitted to war crimes. On Friday, the United States announced new military aid to Ukraine against Russia, including cluster munitions, surpassing a new threshold in the type of weapons supplied to Kyiv.

05:22 Joe Biden arrived in Great Britain / Next Vilnius and then Finland. The US president arrived late Sunday night in London, the first leg of a three-nation tour that will include a meeting Monday with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

A brief summary of recent events:

• Ukrainian troops are “advancing” around the city of Bakhmut in the east of the country, said the commander of the Ground Forces of Ukraine, Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrskyi. Russian air defense systems shot down four missiles on Sunday, Russian officials said, one over the annexed Crimean peninsula and three over the Russian regions of Rostov and Bryansk, which border Ukraine.
• German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is demanding the US not “block” an attempt to supply the Ukrainian army with cluster bombs, while defending his country’s official opposition to the controversial weapon.
• A US Defense Department official says cluster bombs supplied to Ukraine have lower levels of unexploded submunitions after the military tested cluster munitions that US President Joe Biden’s administration plans to send to Kyiv.
• ​The Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Army, General Valery Gerasimov, who was appointed last December to lead the Russian campaign in Ukraine, would be removed from command of the war, according to some Russian military bloggers.
• Denys Prokopenko, one of the commanders of the Azov battalion, who led the weeks-long resistance during the siege of the Azovstal metallurgical plant in Mariupol by Russian troops, announced his intention to return to the front with his comrades after returning from Turkey on Saturday.
• Maria Zakharova said on Sunday that leaders of NATO, the US-led alliance, are to discuss Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant at a summit starting next week in Vilnius.
• As NATO shifts its response to Russia’s campaign in Ukraine, access to new territories and their infrastructure, along with the addition of Finland and Sweden, opens up ways for allies to monitor and counter Moscow and offers an unprecedented chance to treat all of northwestern Europe as a single bloc, a number of diplomats and military officials told Reuters experts
• NATO has turned Vilnius into a fortified fortress with advanced weapons to protect Joe Biden and other alliance leaders who will meet this week just 20 miles from the fence on Lithuania’s border with Belarus.

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Sunday’s events related to Russian aggression were broadcast LIVE on HotNews.ro