Russia Ukraine war live: Dnipro in mourning as Russian missile strike at kindergarten kills five

Ukraine’s biggest domestic rival – corruption – is set to impact its Nato membership as Kyiv will be informed of it as the reason it cannot join the European bloc, officials said.

A senior official in the US State Department said Nato will ask Kyiv to take “additional steps” before any progression on membership talks, reported The Telegraph.

Nato leaders are set to gather for the Washington summit from 9 July to 11 July. Nato’s official line is that Ukraine will join one day, but not while the country is at war. “Ukraine’s future is in NATO,” its leaders declared at last year’s Vilnius summit.

Kyiv will be informed of Nato’s latest position in writing in the Nato communique, the source said, stating that it is a priority for “many of us around the table”.

“We have to step back and applaud everything that Ukraine has done in the name of reforms over the last two-plus years,” they added.

“As they continue to make those reforms, we want to commend them, we want to talk about additional steps that need to be taken, particularly in the area of anti-corruption,” the source said.

Three Ukrainian drones struck an electricity substation near the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and nearby town of Enerhodar, the plant’s Russian-installed management said on Wednesday.

In a statement on Telegram, the plant’s management said that eight staff had been injured and the substation in south-eastern Ukraine damaged.

Russia’s state news agency TASS had reported earlier on Wednesday that the drones had hit the plant itself.

A Russian missile and drone attack on the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro killed five civilians and injured 47 others, including a 14-year-old girl, authorities said.Blasts blew out some windows of a shopping mall, raining shards onto the street, photos published by local officials showed.

Mayor Borys Filatov said the daytime attack also shattered windows in two schools and three kindergartens. Debris struck the intensive care unit of a children’s hospital, and a fire broke out in another hospital.

Volodymyr Zelensky shared a video of the strike and showed a missile with a fiery trail streaking over buildings in Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, and debris flying into the air from its impact.

The attacks ravaged other parts of Ukraine as well. In the Kharkiv region in the northeast, Russian shelling struck a village council building, killing one person and injuring two others, regional head Oleh Suniehubov said.

Elsewhere in the region, a Russian glide bomb struck a residential building in the village of Ruska Lozova, injuring at least two people. Others could be trapped under rubble, Syniehubov said.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan told Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Wednesday that Ankara could help establish a basis to end the Ukraine-Russia war and that a fair peace suiting both sides was possible, the Turkish presidency said.

They two leaders also discussed the war in Gaza and ways to end the conflict in Syria, the Turkish presidency said in a statement after Erdogan and Putin met on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Kazakhstan.

A survey of people in 13 of the nations belonging to NATO found a median of about 6 in 10 held a favorable view of the Western military alliance, the Pew Research Center said Tuesday.

The poll was released ahead of a July 9-11 NATO summit in Washington, which is being held at a challenging time for the 75-year-old Western military alliance. The 32 NATO member countries are adjusting their long-term plans and strategies to counteract a more aggressive Russian President Vladimir Putin and respond to Ukraine’s need for sustained support against invading Russian forces.

Meanwhile, the presidential reelection bid of Donald Trump, who long has spoken scathingly of NATO allies and admiringly of Putin, has some NATO members worrying about the future commitment of the alliance’s most powerful military and economy.

Russian dissidents living in the UK have hit back at the “deeply offensive” words of admiration for Vladimir Putin spoken by Nigel Farage and another Reform UK candidate.

It comes as a British former defence attache who was previously stationed in Moscow described Mr Farage and his party, now third in the polls, as “deeply malign actors … working against the security interests of our country”.

When asked about the accusations, a Reform UK spokesperson burst into laughter before suggesting that Julian Malins, a Reform party candidate who last weekend bragged about meeting Mr Putin and said that he “seemed very good”, was merely a highly intelligent and “eccentric sort of character”.