Russia-Ukraine war live: Kremlin dismisses Macron’s call for ‘Olympic truce’

Photograph: Andreas Rinke/Reuters The Kremlin reacted coolly on Tuesday to France’s president Emmanuel Macron ’s call for a truce in international conflicts during the Paris Olympics, saying Ukraine might use it as an opportunity to regroup and rearm, Reuters reports.

Asked about Macron’s comments, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that both Vladimir Putin and the Russian military had “noticed that, as a rule, the Kyiv regime uses such ideas, such initiatives to try to regroup, to try to rearm, and so on and so forth.

Russia routinely struck Ukrainian power and hydroelectric plants, substations and heat generation facilities in the winter of 2022-23, and launched a massive wave of missile and drone attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure last month as well.

Turkey and the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, have been trying to months to get merchant shipping sailing more freely though the Black Sea, which in some areas has been turned into a naval war zone since Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, has unveiled a complicated proposal for passing wartime aid for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, rejecting pressure to approve a package sent over by the Senate and leaving its path to passage deeply uncertain.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Mariano Grossi, said, without attributing blame, that the “reckless” attacks had put the world “dangerously close to a nuclear accident”.