Ukraine war briefing: Military’s former top commander says Kyiv has no chance of joining Nato

Ukraine’s former top military commander and now ambassador to the UK has been quoted as saying ⁠there is no prospect of the country joining Nato. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, ⁠quoted by Ukrainian news website Evropeiska Pravda, told a meeting of Ukrainian ambassadors on Monday that Ukraine in no way met ⁠the military standards needed to join the alliance. “I know Nato really well. For about 12 years I ⁠personally worked on making sure we met Nato standards, and every ​year I heard tales about ‌how we would join ‌Nato any day now,” the site quoted him as telling the ‌meeting. “Unfortunately, we will never actually join.” Zaluzhnyi said it was “impossible with the level of development that the armed forces of Ukraine have … to join an organisation guided by World War 2 doctrines”. Ukraine has enshrined in its constitution a strategic goal of ​membership of Nato and the EU, but has acknowledged it currently would not be welcomed into Nato by all its members. Zaluzhnyi was dismissed as Ukraine’s top commander in 2024 over differences ⁠with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on conducting the war with Russia.

Ukraine’s frontlines were little changed in July as its forces largely stalled Russia’s momentum, according to an Agence France-Presse analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War thinktank. The Russian army gained a total of less than 40 sq km (15 sq miles) in July, after gaining 30 sq km the previous month. The gains were down sharply from a year earlier, when the Russians were advancing by an average of 405 sq km a month. Kyiv has been carrying out effective strikes deep into Russia and on occupied Ukraine, even as Russia has kept up strikes on Ukraine. In July, the few Russian gains were made in the regions of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, Zaporizhzhia in the south and Sumy in the north-east. The Ukrainian army, for its part, gained 29 sq km in the Dnipropetrovsk region in the centre-east, confirming a trend that began in December 2025.

Zelenskyy has dismissed his ambassador to the United States, Olga Stefanishyna. The Ukrainian president’s move – announced by decree on Monday – had been expected for several weeks and coincides with a shake-up including the ⁠replacement of the prime minister and defence minister. It also comes as Kyiv has been lobbying Washington hard to obtain more Patriot air defence missiles to block Russian strikes. Stefanishyna said on Facebook ‌the move to leave her post was “my own decision, driven by personal circumstances” and that she had accomplished much during her almost one year in the role. “We boosted the supply of American weapons and ‌maintained support right when the political climate in Washington was changing and not in our ​favour.”

Ukrainian drone attacks on a Black Sea resort and the annexed Crimea peninsula killed 11 people, Russian officials said, after blaming Ukraine for another explosion that killed five people in a Moscow restaurant. Pjotr Sauer and Angus Thomson report that seven people, including three children, were killed when “drone debris” struck a beach in the seaside town of Arkhipo-Osipovka, the crisis taskforce for Russia’s southern Krasnodar region said on Monday. Another four people were killed in Crimea in a Ukrainian strike, Moscow-installed governor Sergey Aksyonov said.

Russia earlier blamed Ukraine for a bombing at a restaurant in central Moscow that killed five people and injured 19, amid growing speculation that a senior Russian military commander was the intended target. The explosion occurred on Saturday evening near the entrance to a restaurant at Kudrinskaya Square. Ukrainian authorities have not yet commented.

In Ukraine, one person was killed and dozens more injured in Russian aerial bombings on residential districts in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, regional chief Ivan Fedorov said on Monday. Near the central city of Kryvyi Rig, a Russian attack killed three – including an eight-year-old – at a service station, the Dnipropetrovsk regional military administration chief said.

The prominent Russian anti-war politician Boris Nadezhdin has fled to Paris as Moscow tightens its grip on dissent before parliamentary elections later this year, reports Pjotr Sauer. Nadezhdin, a veteran liberal politician, gained international prominence during Russia’s 2024 presidential election when his long-shot campaign against Vladimir Putin unexpectedly gathered momentum before electoral authorities barred him from running. Since his presidential campaign, Nadezhdin, 63, has remained one of the last well-known Russian public figures to publicly oppose the war in Ukraine.