Turkey drops opposition to Finland, Sweden joining NATO

With the goal to repair relations between Russia and Ukraine and help free up grain exports, Indonesian President Joko Widodo, otherwise known as 'Jokowi’, will meet with both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin in their home countries.

Though his schedule is unclear, Jokowi supposedly made his way to Kyiv after meeting with other world leaders at the Group of Seven meetings in Austria. Before departing Jakarta, the president told reporters that “war has to be stopped and global food supply chains need to be reactivated."

As one of the world’s biggest developing nations, Indonesia has maintained friendly relations with both Russia and Ukraine. It has also relied heavily on the two countries for both grain and fertilizer imports.

In recent years, Indonesia has taken a more active role in foreign affairs, including participating in regional efforts to bring peace to Myanmar in the wake of last year’s military coup.

Widodo is the chair of the Group of 20 (G-20) nations and will host the G-20 summit in Bali this November. Russia is part of the G-20, but some countries have threatened a boycott if Putin attends. Jokowi has invited Ukraine to join the summit, even though it is not a member of the bloc.

The trilateral deal struck Tuesday, which paved the way for Finland and Sweden to join NATO, was the culmination of careful behind-the-scenes diplomatic wrangling that began some six months ago with a phone call between President Biden and his Finnish counterpart, a senior administration official said.

The agreement, reached on the opening day of a NATO summit in Madrid, confirms that Turkey will support the Nordic nations’ accession after opposing their bids for more than a month. In a Tuesday morning phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Biden encouraged him to “seize this moment” and get a deal done, the American official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.

The administration had downplayed Biden’s role in the process and the senior official said this was “a conscious decision,” in part to prevent Turkey from asking the United States for concessions. U.S. negotiators offered none and Turkey did not ask, the official said.

Biden felt strongly that Washington should not be the deal’s main broker and instead “used his moments selectively to try to help put a thumb on the scale to get this across the finish line,” the official said.

This began in December, when a Russian invasion of Ukraine began to look more likely and Biden contacted Finnish President Sauli Niinistö to begin discussions about Finland and Sweden possibly joining NATO, the official recounted. After a January phone call, the two met at the White House in March.

During that meeting, as Biden has said, the leaders picked up the phone on an Oval Office side table and dialed Swedish President Magdalena Andersson through the White House Situation Room.

On Tuesday, nearly four months later, Biden issued a statement congratulating Finland and Sweden on their pending membership in the military alliance.

“Their membership will strengthen NATO’s collective security and benefit the entire Transatlantic Alliance,” he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on the United Nations Security Council to label Russia a terrorist state after Moscow fired more than 60 missiles across Ukraine in recent days, killing scores of civilians, including at a busy shopping mall in central Ukraine. Russia is tearing through long-range weapons for tactical advantage, Western defense officials say, but so far it has made only limited battleground gains in the east, and its forces are increasingly hollowed out.

Here are some updates from across the country:

Central Ukraine: The day after a Russia struck a shopping mall in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, witnesses described a scene of “horror” and “hell.” At least 18 civilians were killed in the attack. The Russian Defense Ministry claims that the shopping center was “nonfunctioning” at the time of the attack; Zelensky said there were at least 1,000 people inside. The government released closed-circuit TV footage it said showed the moment the Russian missile struck.

Dnipro region: The governor of Dnipro region in east-central Ukraine reported an “enemy attack” Tuesday and said rescue workers were searching for people under rubble. The reports couldn’t immediately be verified.

Donbas region: Russian forces haven’t yet encircled Lysychansk, their new target in eastern Ukraine after capturing its twin city of Severodonetsk. Ukrainian forces are consolidating their positions on higher ground in the city, Britain’s Defense Ministry said in a battleground update. Russia’s armed forces are “increasingly hollowed out,” the British officials added, having fielded core elements of six different armies yet achieved only tactical success at Severodonetsk.

Kherson: Near this city in Ukraine’s south, occupied by Russian forces in the early days of the invasion, there are growing signs of resistance. An official with the U.S. Defense Department said Monday that it was aware of assassination attempts on local Russian officials, as well as reports suggesting that Ukrainians have been successful in liberating several small towns northwest and west of Kherson.

David Stern contributed to this report.

NATO negotiations to increase troop commitments for Eastern Europe were stuck until Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin personally intervened to cajole wavering countries to step up their commitments, a senior European defense official said Tuesday.

NATO leaders gathered at a summit in Madrid are expected on Wednesday to sign off on plans to have “forward-deployed headquarters” to command new combat brigades in Eastern Europe, the senior European defense official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations before the official announcement. The headquarters, long sought by the Baltic nations and Poland, would elevate the combat capabilities of the expanded forces beyond the sheer extra number of troops.

“Positive development was achieved only when Secretary Austin personally engaged on the matter,” the senior official said.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg already announced plans this week to expand the troops committed to Eastern Europe to roughly the size of a brigade in each country, about three to four times as many as were deployed before Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine. Most of those troops won’t actually sit in the front-line countries, but they will preposition their equipment and train on the ground frequently so that they are ready to speed to the defense of the NATO countries that border Russia in case of an emergency.

The senior official said that the significance of the commitment is less about having more soldiers and more about the combat capabilities that come in the expansion from a battalion — about 1,000 troops — to a brigade — about 3,000 to 4,000 troops. The new combat units will have air defense, artillery, and improved reconnaissance and targeting capabilities that will increase their ability to fight back threats from Russia.

Britain will deploy new troops to Estonia, Canada to Latvia and Germany to Lithuania, the official said, all plans that are expected to be announced on Wednesday.

Day after day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has denounced Russian attacks on his country as war crimes. Anyone who doubts it, he has said, need only look at the evidence, so much of it captured on video.

On Tuesday, Zelensky screened some himself.

During his nightly address, which is regularly viewed more than a million times across social media platforms, Zelensky focused on the Russian strike at a shopping mall in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk. At least 18 were killed in the attack. Moscow has denied that its military targeted the mall and described it as “nonfunctioning” — a claim rebutted by firsthand witnesses who spoke to The Washington Post.

Taking aim at “Russian propagandists who lie about this terror,” Zelensky vowed they would be punished and said Ukrainian authorities are collecting evidence against them.

“Today, I want to end this address with one such piece of evidence, so that no one dares to deceive about the missile strike at the shopping mall in Kremenchuk,” Zelensky said. “They wanted to kill as many people as possible in a peaceful city, in a regular shopping mall. Here is what happened in Kremenchuk.”

He rolled the tape, which appeared to be captured by a nearby security camera. It showed, in chilling slow motion, a rocket colliding with a building and exploding, sending up a conflagration and a dark plume of smoke.

Russia’s space agency published the coordinates of the U.S. Pentagon and other Western defense headquarters, saying Western satellite operators were working for Ukraine — Russia’s “enemy.”

In a piece published by the Russian RIA Novosti news agency, Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, said: “The entire conglomerate of private and state orbital groupings is now working exclusively for our enemy.”

The coordinates of the NATO summit were also published. Members of the NATO alliance have made no secret of the fact that they are sending weapons to help Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion.

“Today, the NATO summit opens in Madrid, at which Western countries will declare Russia their worst enemy,” Rogozin wrote on his Telegram social media channel. “Roscosmos publishes satellite photographs of the summit venue and the very ‘decision centers’ that support Ukrainian nationalists.”

Satellite pictures of the White House in Washington, British government buildings in central London, the German Chancellery and Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, NATO headquarters in Brussels, and the French president’s residence were also published in the post.

“We are giving the coordinates of the objects,” said Rogozin, “just in case.”

In a fiery speech to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged the international body to label Russia a terrorism sponsor, strip the country of its permanent seat on the council and establish a tribunal to investigate its alleged war crimes.

Ukraine called for a meeting of the Security Council after a Russian missile strike on a shopping mall killed at least 18 people, and Zelensky used the occasion to draw attention to a string of recent attacks. He listed them one after another, counting the casualties and naming some of the victims: 62 Russian missiles on Saturday, 10 rockets on Sunday, more shelling Monday — at the mall and on a line of people queuing for water in the east and a residential building in Kharkiv. The bombardment left several children dead, he said: An 8-year-old, a 9-year-old, two 10-year-olds.

“Who of you does not agree that this is terrorism?” Zelensky asked the Security Council. “Daily terrorist acts, without weekends. Every day they are working as terrorists.”

In the 125 days since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Zelensky has repeatedly addressed the United Nations, weary and frustrated, imploring diplomats and world leaders to do more, and faster, to counter Moscow’s aggression. He has said a failure to act would jeopardize the body’s legitimacy.

Quoting U.N. bylaws, Zelensky on Tuesday argued that the Security Council has the responsibility to hold Russia to account at the world level. He compared the war in Ukraine to the genocide in Rwanda, where the U.N. set up a tribunal six months into the conflict. Four months into the war, Zelensky said the body should do the same in Ukraine.

“We need to act urgently to do everything to make Russia stop the killing spree,” he said.

Undersecretary General Rosemary A. DiCarlo said that civilians “continue to pay too high a price in this war” and that Russia’s use of artillery is “inherently indiscriminate.”