Ukraine Update…502 days into the Russian move on Ukraine…Putin and Prigozhin met since mutiny….

President Biden is in the United Kingdom, his first stop in a three-nation trip focused in part on rallying the support of U.S. allies for Ukraine. On Monday, he met with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Downing Street and with King Charles III at Windsor Castle. Later this week, Biden will attend a NATO summit in Lithuania and visit Finland, which recently joined the alliance.

Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.

• Wagner commanders pledged their loyalty to Putin at their meeting with him after the June 24 rebellion, according to Peskov. “The commanders themselves presented their version of what had happened,” Peskov said. He added that Putin listened and offered them “employment options,” without specifying what they entailed and whether they were extended to Prigozhin. The Wagner chief’s future is unclear after the rebellion last month: Last week, Prigozhin returned to Russia to collect money and guns, suggesting the failure of his mutiny attempt may not have cost him all his remaining leverage.
• Biden said that a NATO membership vote for Ukraine would be “premature” while the war with Russia is ongoing, citing disagreement among NATO members, and called for a “rational path” for Ukraine to join the bloc. To bring Ukraine into the alliance now, he said, would instantly draw NATO into the war with Russia. “I think we have to lay out a rational path for Ukraine to be able to qualify to be able to get into NATO,” he told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an interview. On Monday, Peskov reiterated Moscow’s opposition to the prospect. “Ukraine will become a threat to our country, which will require an understandable and firm response,” he said.
• Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine has fundamentally altered relations between Russia and the West, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg wrote in a Foreign Affairs article that published Monday. “Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine has shattered any remaining illusions of peaceful cooperation,” he said. He also hailed NATO’s recent expansion to include Finland, saying: “This is a game changer for European security and will provide an uninterrupted shield from the Baltic to the Black Sea.”
• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan outlined a new condition for Ankara to approve Sweden’s stalled NATO bid: Progress toward Turkish accession to the E.U. “Come and pave the way for Turkey in the European Union, then let’s pave the way for Sweden,” Erdogan told reporters before departing to Lithuania on Monday. Helping Turkey join the E.U. is not in NATO’s remit. Biden and Erdogan discussed Turkey’s resistance to Sweden joining NATO in a phone call on Sunday, Turkish state media reported. The cost of Turkey’s acquiescence, officials and analysts say,appears to include a tentative $20 billion deal for American F-16 fighter jets.

• Four people were killed in a Russian attack on the southeastern city of Orikhiv, near the front line,officials in Zaporizhzhia’s regional military administration said Monday morning. In a Telegram post, officials said three women and one man, all in their 40s, died when a guided Russian bomb dropped on a residential neighborhood, injuring 11 others.
• Russian attacks have killed more than 170 civilians in Kyiv, including seven children, since the start of the invasion, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a televised interviewon Sunday.
• Russia is likely straining to deal with the high number of casualties being inflicted upon its forces, according to an update from Britain’s Defense Ministry. Intelligence officials said Monday that Russia is struggling to evacuate the injured in a timely manner and failing to administer proper first aid. “Russia is almost certainly struggling with a crisis of combat medical provision,” intelligence officials said Monday on Twitter.
• Some Democratic lawmakers have raised concerns about the United States’ decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine. Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) said he had “real qualms” about the decision, and Rep. Barbara Lee (Calif.) accused the White House of crossing a line by supplying Ukraine with the munitions, whose use and transfer are widely prohibited elsewhere in the world. Sen. Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and former senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) also opposed the decision in a Washington Post opinion article on Friday.

• Stoltenberg called on Western allies to make a “generational commitment to increase defense spending.” Military investment, he wrote, would allow allies to support Ukraine for the “long haul,” safeguard Europe’s future and signal to other authoritarian regimes that aggressive wars end in failure. “If Russia stops fighting, there will be peace. If Ukraine stops fighting, it will cease to exist as a nation,” he wrote.
• Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Twitter that he had “an important discussion” with Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, ahead of the NATO summit, and that he was looking forward to talks there on continued NATO support for Ukraine.
• Wimbledon crowds booed Belarusian tennis player Victoria Azarenka after she lost to her Ukrainian opponent, Elina Svitolina. The boos appeared to focus on the pair not shaking hands after the match, in line with the policy of Ukrainian players in protest of the war. The tennis tournament welcomed back Russian and Belarusian players this year, after banning them in 2022.
• Polish President Andrzej Duda joined Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the western Ukrainian city of Lutsk on Sunday to remember the victims of the 1943 Volhynia massacre, in which tens of thousands of Poles were murdered by Ukrainian nationalists. Poland is one of Ukraine’s closest allies in the war against Russia, which has given Warsaw and Kyiv the opportunity to try to come to terms with their shared past, but the World War II-era killings have remained a strain on relations.

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….

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