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Turkey on Monday agreed to admit Sweden to NATO, the alliance’s secretary general said, dropping months of opposition. The move came on the eve of a NATO summit in Lithuania.
President Biden arrived in Lithuania on Monday for the talks, after a stop in Britain — part of a trip focused in part on rallying the support of U.S. allies for Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is set to attend the summit. Later this week, Biden is set to visit Finland, which recently joined the alliance.
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.
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.
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