In Kyiv visit, European leaders back Ukraine’s candidacy to join E.U.

Dutch authorities made a surprise announcement Thursday that they had refused entry to a Russian spy posing as a Brazilian national to infiltrate the International Criminal Court. Authorities speculated that the man was seeking to gain access to information relating to the ICC’s investigations of alleged Russian war crimes.

The alleged spy “was sent back to Brazil on the first flight out,” authorities said of the events, which took place in April.

Ukraine’s allies need to accelerate their military assistance and other forms of aid before war fatigue takes hold in the West and Russia makes territorial gains that could become permanent, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said.

Kallas, who has emerged as one of Europe’s most outspoken proponents of a robust response to the Russian invasion, said it is vital for Europe and the United States to remain focused on helping Ukraine to win, despite waning public attention on the four-month-old war, which seems set to drag on for many more months.

Away from the battlefield, Ukraine’s survival in the face of the Russian onslaught depends on how unified the United States and its allies remain, as Moscow’s war stresses economies around the world with painfully high energy costs and a potentially devastating food crisis.

So far, that unity has been remarkable. The United States and its partners have armed Ukraine and trained its forces with increasingly advanced weapons, while a flood of humanitarian aid has poured into Kyiv and neighboring nations that opened their doors to millions of refugees.

Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended ongoing weapons and security aid to Ukraine as it struggles to fend off intense attacks from Moscow by saying that “the numbers clearly favor the Russians” in the war’s current state.

Ukraine has in recent weeks sent urgent pleas for more weapons, as it has been outmanned and outgunned in defending its eastern Donbas region. Ukraine has lost ground in recent days, with Moscow forecast to gain control of the key city of Severodonetsk in the Luhansk region of Donbas in the coming weeks.

The White House has again warned Americans not to travel to Ukraine amid reports that two U.S. military veterans have been captured by Russian troops.

Alexander J. Drueke, 39, and Andy Tai Huynh, 27, both of Alabama, were last seen near Kharkiv, close to the Russian border, according to their families. Both men had made the journey to join Ukraine’s fight against Russia, their loved ones said, and have not been heard from since June 8.

BERLIN — The leaders of the European Union’s three largest economies on Thursday said they were backing Ukraine’s candidacy to join the 27-member bloc, a move that President Volodymyr Zelensky has fiercely advocated as his country loses ground in the face of Russia’s invasion.

French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi pledged the backing after traveling by overnight train to Kyiv. Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, who is also visiting Kyiv to meet with Zelensky, accompanied them.

NATO allies are close to reaching an agreement on a new force model, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday, with an announcement expected at a summit in Madrid later this month.

“Russia’s war against Ukraine poses the biggest threat to our security in decades. So we must set out NATO’s response for the longer term,” he said at a news conference in Brussels following a meeting of defense ministers in Brussels.

RIGA, Latvia — Russia is scrambling to recruit men to fight in Ukraine after major losses in the early months of the war left the army stretched thin and some soldiers disenchanted.

The Kremlin has so far declined to order a general mobilization of draft-age soldiers, because this could signal that the war is not proceeding as well as depicted in the Russian media and threaten to stir grass-roots resistance to the military campaign.