TOP HEADLINES

• Ukraine's air force said it had downed 16 Iranian-made drones launched by Russian forces overnight, in the fourth consecutive night of aerial attacks by Moscow. 

• U.S. President Joe Biden said Russia's Vladimir Putin has already lost the war in Ukraine, expressing hope that Kyiv's counteroffensive would force Moscow to the negotiating table. READ MORE BELOW

• President Putin said if Ukraine were to be admitted to NATO, it would make the world more vulnerable, after the bloc vowed closer integration with Kyiv at its summit this week. 

• Putin also said that missiles supplied to Kyiv by its Western allies had not fundamentally changed the course of fighting on the battlefield in Ukraine. "Yes they cause damage but nothing critical is happening," Putin said in an interview broadcast on state-run television.

• The Wagner group soldiers have been offered the opportunity to keep serving within the Russian regular military but Putin said Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin refused to let his fighters serve under someone else's command. 

• Wagner mercenaries are no longer participating in "any significant capacity" in combat operations in Ukraine, the Pentagon said, more than two weeks after the group's aborted mutiny in Russia. 

• Ukraine's armed forces have now received cluster munitions promised by the U.S. to help boost Kyiv's slow-moving counteroffensive, senior military officials from the two countries said. "We just got them, we haven't used them yet, but they can radically change (the battlefield)," Ukrainian army commander Oleksandr Tarnavskyi told U.S. broadcaster CNN. 

READ: Why are clusterbombs controversial?

IN DETAIL

Biden says Putin has already lost the war in Ukraine

U.S. President Joe Biden said Russia's Vladimir Putin has already lost the war in Ukraine, expressing hope that Kyiv's counteroffensive would force Moscow to the negotiating table.

As Russia launched fresh strikes and a new bout of nuclear-saber rattling, Biden said there was no real prospect of Putin using nuclear weapons and insisted the war would not drag on for years.

Biden also used a visit to Finland, NATO's newest member, to pledge that Ukraine would one day join the alliance, despite NATO leaders failing to give Kyiv a timeline at a key summit this week.

"Putin's already lost the war. Putin has a real problem," Biden told a press conference with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto. "There is no possibility of him winning the war in Ukraine."

NATO leaders had dashed Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy's hopes for a clear timeline to join the military alliance, saying at this week's summit in Vilnius that they would offer an invite only when "conditions are met."

But while Biden said no country could become a NATO member while it was at war - with Ukraine joining now meaning a "third world war" - he vowed Kyiv would one day join the club.

"It's not about whether or not they should or shouldn't join. It's about when they can join, and they will join NATO," Biden said.

Putin told journalists that if Ukraine were to be admitted to NATO, it would "in general make the world much more vulnerable" and boost global tensions.

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