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Here’s where things stand on Monday 15 July 2025:

Fighting:

• Russian drone attacks killed a 53-year-old Ukrainian man in Ukraine’s Sumy region and left parts of the city of Sumy without power, the Kyiv Independent reported, citing local authorities.
• Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service said it killed several Russian secret service agents during an operation to arrest them in the Kyiv region on Sunday. The SBU said it believed the agents were behind the killing of its colonel, Ivan Voronych, in Kyiv on Thursday.
• Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces have captured the villages of Mykolaivka and Myrne in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
• The United Nations’s nuclear watchdog reported hearing hundreds of rounds of small arms fire late on Saturday at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is occupied by Russian forces. The agency described the shots as unusual and said that it was seeking further information about the incident.

Weapons

• United States President Donald Trump said Washington would send Patriot air defence systems to Ukraine, without specifying how many, just two weeks after Washington said it would pause some arms deliveries for Kyiv. “I haven’t agreed on the number yet, but they’re going to have some because they do need protection,” he told reporters.
• Top Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a key Trump ally, told the CBS News broadcaster that he expects an influx of US weapons shipments to Ukraine to begin soon. “The game… is about to change,” he said. “I expect, in the coming days, you will see weapons flowing at a record level to help Ukraine defend themselves.”

Politics and diplomacy

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his government is preparing to receive Trump’s special envoy, Keith Kellogg, in Kyiv on Monday and said: “We count on the United States fully understanding what can be done to compel Russia to peace.”
• Zelenskyy also said Russian forces launched more than 1,800 long-range drones, more than 1,200 glide bombs and 83 missiles of various types at Ukraine in the past week.
• Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov met his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, in Beijing on Sunday and “discussed relations with the United States and prospects for resolving the Ukrainian crisis”, according to Moscow.
• French President Emmanuel Macron called for a massive boost to France’s defence spending, saying that freedom in Europe is facing a greater threat than at any time since the end of World War II.

Trump says US will send Patriot missiles to Ukraine

US president makes announcement amid growing frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

United  President Donald Trump has said he will send Patriot air defence systems to Ukraine as his administration signals growing disillusionment with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s refusal to negotiate an end to Moscow’s invasion.

“We will send them Patriots, which they desperately need,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Sunday.

“Putin really surprised a lot of people. He talks nice and then he bombs everybody in the evening,” Trump said.

“So, there’s a little bit of a problem there. I don’t like it.”

Trump said he had not decided on the number of Patriot batteries he would send to Ukraine, but “they’re going to have some because they do need protection”.

Trump’s  comments come after he last week confirmed that his administration had decided to sell weapons to NATO allies in Europe for them to pass on to Kyiv.

Trump is set to meet NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte this week for discussions expected to focus on his plans to supply weapons to Kyiv.

Rutte’s trip to Washington, DC comes as Trump has teased that he will make a “major statement” on Russia on Monday.

On Sunday, Axios, citing two unnamed sources, reported that Trump’s announcement would include “offensive weapons” for Ukraine.

After campaigning on a promise to bring a swift end to the war in Ukraine, Trump has expressed growing frustration with Putin’s refusal to agree to a peace deal.

While Putin has agreed to brief pauses in fighting, he has knocked back US proposals for an unconditional 30-day ceasefire.

Russia has argued that the proposal, which has been accepted by Ukraine, would give Kyiv a chance to remobilise its troops and rearm.

In some of his strongest criticism yet of Putin, Trump on Tuesday accused the Russian leader of throwing a lot of “b******” at the US.

“He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless,” Trump said.

After returning to the White House in January, Trump moved to scale back support for Kyiv, casting Washington’s aid as a drain on the US taxpayer and accusing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of being an obstacle to peace.

While Ukraine continued to receive weaponry through funds allocated during the tenure of former US president Joe Biden, Trump had declined to approve new arms shipments to help Kyiv repel Moscow’s invasion.

Following months of unsuccessful efforts to broker a peace between Moscow and Kyiv, Trump on July 7 announced that he would begin approving shipments to Ukraine comprised mostly of “defensive weapons”.

Asked on Sunday if his upcoming announcement on Russia would involve sanctions against Moscow, Trump declined to answer but repeated that he was disappointed with Putin.

“I am very disappointed with President Putin. I thought he was somebody that meant what he said,” Trump said.

“And he’ll talk so beautifully, and then he’ll bomb people at night. We don’t like that.”

Earlier on Sunday, US Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the staunchest supporters of Ukraine in Congress, unveiled a bipartisan sanctions bill that he said would provide Trump with a “sledgehammer” to end the war.

“This congressional package that we’re looking at would give President Trump the ability to impose 500 percent tariffs on any country that helps Russia and props up Putin’s war machine,” Graham told CBS News’s Face the Nation.

“He can dial it up or down. He can go to zero, to 500. He has maximum flexibility.”

Zelenskyy nominates Yulia Svyrydenko as new Ukraine PM in cabinet shake-up

President Zelenskyy taps economy minister to lead government in most significant reshuffle since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he has recommended Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko to become prime minister in a significant political shake-up for the war-scarred country.

The announcement on Monday could herald a wider reshuffle in the government, three and a half years into the Russian invasion.

“I  have proposed that Yuliia Svyrydenko lead the government of Ukraine and significantly renew its work,” Zelenskyy wrote on social media. “I look forward to the presentation of the new government’s action plan in the near future.”

The recommendation is part of what he called “a transformation of the executive branch” of government in Ukraine.

The two discussed “concrete measures to boost Ukraine’s economic potential, expand support programs for Ukrainians and scale up our domestic weapons production”, Zelenskyy said.

Svyrydenko, 39, gained prominence this year during fraught negotiations around a rare minerals deal with the United States that nearly derailed ties between Kyiv and its most important military ally.

If the change is approved, she would replace Denys Shmyhal, who became prime minister in 2020.

“The government needs a change because people are exhausted,” said Tymofiy Mylovanov, a former economy minister who worked with Svyrydenko.

Mylovanov, who now heads the Kyiv School of Economics, said the changes would likely bring “a sort of freshness” after more than three years of war.

Zelenskyy is also considering naming Defence Minister Rustem Umerov as Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington, he said at a news conference last week.

Zelenskyy  met Umerov over the weekend, after which he said, “Ukraine needs more positive dynamics in relations with the United States and at the same time new steps in managing the defence sector of our state.”

Svyrydenko, who is also a deputy prime minister, was appointed to manage Ukraine’s struggling economy months before the Kremlin launched its full-scale assault in February 2022.

Her appointment will require approval by parliament, which has largely united around Zelenskyy since the invasion and is unlikely to vote against the president.