𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Thirteen people were injured in a Ukrainian drone attack on a residential building in Russia’s southern city of Rostov-on-Don on Thursday, acting regional governor Yuri Slyusar said.

No further details are currently available on the strike – we’ll bring you the latest as it comes/

Vladimir Putin has “only one card” left to play – to prolong the killing in Ukraine, according to a senior source in Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidential office as Europe held top-level talks ahead of the Alaska summit this week.

Zelensky has not been invited to Friday’s meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. And there are deep concerns that the US president will emerge from the encounter taking an even harder line on Ukraine.

Europe’s leaders, including Keir Starmer, have been corralling US officials and White House insiders, and met virtually with the Oval Office to try to persuade Trump to use the leverage he has over Putin to get him to agree to a ceasefire.

Our world affairs editor Sam Kiley writes:

The Independent’s Whitehall editor Kate Devlin reports:

The PM’s meeting with the Ukrainian leader this morning will be highly symbolic.

After days of diplomatic wrangling, the two men are putting on a show – for the US president.

The message is clear – the UK, like mush of Europe, is standing strong with Zelensky.

On the eve of Trump’s potentially historic summit with Putin in Alaska, there is some cautious optimism that the US is coming more onside to Europe’s arguments, including that nothing is imposed on Ukraine and that the country has to be involved in its own destiny.

This follows a call with European leaders, including the PM, on Thursday.

The fear, as always, however, is how unpredictable the US President can be.

WhatsApp said Russia was trying to block its services because the social media messaging app owned by Meta Platforms offered people’s right to secure communication, and vowed to continue trying to make encrypted services available in Russia.

Russia has started restricting some Telegram and WhatsApp calls, accusing the foreign-owned platforms of failing to share information with law enforcement in fraud and terrorism cases.

“WhatsApp is private, end-to-end encrypted, and defies government attempts to violate people’s right to secure communication, which is why Russia is trying to block it from over 100 million Russian people,” WhatsApp said in a statement.

“We will keep doing all we can to make end-to-end encrypted communication available to people everywhere, including in Russia.”

The meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at an American military base allows them to avoid any protests and provides an important level of security, said Benjamin Jensen, senior fellow for defense and security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

“For President Trump, it’s a great way for him to show American military strength while also isolating the ability of the public or others to intervene with what he probably hopes is a productive dialogue,” Jensen said.

He said the location means Trump can cultivate ties with Putin while “signaling military power to try to gain that bargaining advantage to make a second meeting possible”.

After Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Donald Trump described the Russian leader in positive terms.”I mean, he’s taking over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart,” Trump said at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

In a radio interview that week, he suggested that Vladimir Putin was going into Ukraine to “be a peacekeeper.”

Trump repeatedly said the invasion of Ukraine would never have happened if he had been in the White House — a claim Putin endorsed while lending his support to Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

“I couldn’t disagree with him that if he had been president, if they hadn’t stolen victory from him in 2020, the crisis that emerged in Ukraine in 2022 could have been avoided,” he said.

Russia appears to be preparing to test its new nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered cruise missile, according to two US researchers and a Western security source, even as Russian president Vladimir Putin readies for talks on Ukraine with US president DonaldTrump tomorrow.

Jeffrey Lewis of the California-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies, and Decker Eveleth of the CNA research and analysis organisation, based in Virginia, reached their assessments separately by studying imagery taken in recent weeks until Tuesday by Planet Labs, a commercial satellite firm.

They agreed the photos showed extensive activity at the Pankovo test site on the Barents Sea archipelago of Novaya Zemlya, including increases in personnel and equipment and ships and aircraft associated with earlier tests of the 9M730 Burevestnik (Storm Petrel).

“We can see all of the activity at the test site, which is both huge amounts of supplies coming in to support operations and movement at the place where they actually launch the missile,” Lewis said.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky will meet with prime minister Keir Starmer in Downing Street later today, part of a final push for a European perspective to be heard ahead of a summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

We’ll bring you more details on exactly when the meeting will take place, but its likely to be little more than 24 hours before the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.

Sir Keir and Trump both joined a teleconference with European leaders including Zelensky yesterday.

“The prime minister was clear that our support for Ukraine is unwavering – international borders must not be changed by force and Ukraine must have robust and credible security guarantees to defend its territorial integrity as part of any deal,” Starmer’s Downing Street office said in a statement yesterday.

Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had struck a number of Ukrainian missile plants, weapons design bureaus and rocket fuel productions enterprises with missiles and drones in July.

Russian forces destroyed a number of Western missile defence systems – including Patriot launchers and fire control radar in the Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy regions – that had been deployed to defend the plants, the ministry said in an update this morning.

“An attempt by the Kyiv regime, together with its Western partners, to organise the production of missiles to carry out attacks deep into the territory of the Russian Federation was thwarted,” the ministry said.