
Musk launches 'America Party' following public feud with Trump
The announcement came a day after Trump signed his sweeping tax cut and spending bill into law, a legislative act that Musk has fiercely opposed.
Team
Olena Goncharova is the Head of North America desk at The Kyiv Independent, where she has previously worked as a development manager and Canadian correspondent. She first joined the Kyiv Post, Ukraine's oldest English-language newspaper, as a staff writer in January 2012 and became the newspaper’s Canadian correspondent in June 2018. She is based in Edmonton, Alberta. Olena has a master’s degree in publishing and editing from the Institute of Journalism in Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. Olena was a 2016 Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellow who worked for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for six months. The program is administered by the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia.
The announcement came a day after Trump signed his sweeping tax cut and spending bill into law, a legislative act that Musk has fiercely opposed.
Rosaviatsia reported on the evening of July 6 that 287 flights had been grounded across three major airports: Moscow's Sheremetyevo, St. Petersburg's Pulkovo, and Strigino Airport in Nizhny Novgorod.
"Russia is reconstituting itself at a pace and a speed which is unparalleled in recent history," NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said, adding that "...they are now producing three times as much ammunition in three months as the whole of NATO is doing in a year."
The slowdown indicates that Western sanctions, though not a knockout blow, are increasingly damaging the Russian economy.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte presided over the handover, commending outgoing U.S. Army General Christopher G. Cavoli for his contributions to modernizing NATO's collective defense and bolstering support for Ukraine.
The airfield hosts Su-34, Su-35S, and Su-30SM jets that Russia regularly uses in air strikes against Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian military.
Moldovan President Maia Sandu hopes her pro-European Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) will retain its parliamentary majority in the September 28 elections.
"The US has to make sure that the stockpiles are at the level we need for the U.S. to have, because they are crucial for our collective defense," Rutte told reporters on July 4. "At the same time, of course, we hope for the flexibility, we have to make sure also that Ukraine can move forward."
Lukashenko said the deployment of advanced weapons systems to Belarus would serve as a tool for maintaining domestic stability. "I’m confident that even those of our supporters who don’t yet understand this will come to realize it — without a war."
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz also cited the Taurus missile system’s complexity, saying it requires at least six months of training — something Germany has not yet agreed to begin.
Authorities detained former Russian Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov in April 2024 on bribery allegations, later adding embezzlement charges in October.
The new deal replaces the autonomous trade measures that allowed Ukrainian agri-food exports to enter the EU tariff-free since 2022.
"Peskov’s recent comments on the state of negotiations are Orwellian. Russian claims that it is the US and Ukraine stalling peace talks are unfounded," Special Envoy Keith Kellogg said on June 30.
According to Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR), the vessel belongs to Russia's shadow fleet, used by Moscow to evade sanctions.
The visits come amid growing North Korea-Russia engagement across multiple sectors, including military cooperation.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe told U.S. lawmakers that most of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium likely remains buried under rubble at the Isfahan and Fordo nuclear sites, two of the three key facilities targeted by U.S. strikes.
"Let us return to respect for international law and seek ways to communicate with the Russian Federation," Slovakia’s Foreign Minister Juraj Blanar said on June 29.
"I had a phone call with my American counterpart, and we reserved for each other the possibility to call each other at any time and discuss issues of interest to us," the Director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin said.
The official handover ceremony took place earlier in Belgium, but was disclosed only later due to security concerns.
Short-range drone attacks have become one of the deadliest threats to civilians in Ukraine’s front-line regions, killing at least 395 people and injuring 2,635 between February 2022 and April 2025, according to a new bulletin by the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.
Over 100 teachers have relocated to Crimea through the program, according to Ukraine’s Regional Center for Human Rights. Most of them arrived from regions including Krasnodar, Altai Krai, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Saratov, Tyumen, Ivanovo, and the Republic of Udmurtia.
Ukraine has reduced its mined territory by over 20% since late 2022, but around 137,000 square kilometers (52,900 square miles) — much of it farmland — remain hazardous, according to the State Emergency Service.
Speaking on June 24, Volodymyr Zelensky stressed that Russia would never have been able to carry out such drone attacks without support from Iran, and Ukraine, in turn, could not have intercepted most of the drones without the help of its international partners.
The U.S. intelligence assessment, based on a battle damage report from Central Command, contradicts public statements by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who claimed the operation had "obliterated" Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
Although Article 5 is central to NATO’s security framework, U.S. President Donald Trump has previously expressed skepticism about honoring it, often criticizing member states for not contributing enough to shared defense efforts.
During a joint visit to a U.K. military training site for Ukrainian personnel, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he and Zelensky held "an excellent bilateral meeting" and had agreed to an "industrial military co-production agreement."
At least 10 missiles were fired at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and at least one toward a base in Iraq, Axios reported.
Russia wants to end the war in Ukraine "as soon as possible," preferably through peaceful means, and is ready to continue negotiations — provided that Kyiv and its Western allies are willing to engage, Vladimir Putin said.
The U.S. Senate is postponing action on a bipartisan Russia sanctions bill until at least July, as other legislative and foreign policy priorities dominate the agenda, Semafor reported on June 18.
Russia’s hardline nationalist elite reportedly argues that only a formal war declaration would permit true escalation—full-scale mobilisation, regular missile strikes, and potentially the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said on June 17 that the G7 summit had produced concrete results for Ukraine, including increased military support, new tranches of aid using frozen Russian assets, and additional sanctions targeting the sources of Russia’s war effort.
President Volodymyr Zelensky is cutting his visit to Canada short and will return to Kyiv on June 17, while G7 talks are still ongoing, a source told a Kyiv Independent journalist on the ground.