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Russia launched the most extensive aerial bombardment of Ukraine since its full-scale invasion, according to Kyiv, signalling a sharp escalation in Moscow’s campaign and further undermining fragile hopes for a negotiated resolution to the war now in its fourth year.

Ukraine’s air force said Russia had fired a staggering 537 aerial weapons in a single overnight barrage that began late on Saturday, including 477 explosive drones and decoys and 60 missiles of various types. Ukrainian air defences intercepted 211 drones and 38 missiles.

The scale of the assault marks a dramatic intensification in Russia’s strategy. Ukrainian officials say Moscow aims to systematically degrade the country’s limited air defence network and exhaust its western-supplied arsenal.

Ukraine’s air force said one of its F-16 pilots, Lieutenant General Col Maksym Ustymenko, was killed after his aircraft sustained damage while downing seven aerial targets. He steered the plane away from populated areas, it added, but was unable to eject in time.

To the south in Kherson, regional authorities said one man was killed in a drone attack. In Kharkiv, in the north-east, two men were killed when a drone struck their car, according to the regional governor. Residential buildings sustained damage in several other cities.

In Kyiv, residents took refuge in bomb shelters and metro stations deep underground, while the booms of air defences intercepting Russian drones reverberated above. Several missiles and drones struck critical infrastructure in the western city of Lviv, which sits close to the border with Nato member Poland, according to the mayor.

Ukraine has used fighter jets for air defence in part because of its dwindling supply of surface-to-air defence systems and interceptor missiles. The Trump administration has so far declined to sell Kyiv more of the prized Patriot air defence systems, a few of which were provided in security packages under President Joe Biden.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on western partners to step up support for his war-battered nation and reiterated Kyiv’s readiness to buy more air defence systems from Washington.

“Ukraine needs to strengthen its air defence — the thing that best protects lives,” Zelenskyy wrote on X. “These are American systems, which we are ready to buy.

“Moscow will not stop as long as it has the capability to launch massive strikes,” he wrote, adding that “pressure on the aggressor is needed” in the face of Russia’s air attacks and its summer ground offensive.

Russia attacked Ukraine with more than 114 missiles, over 1,270 drones and nearly 1,100 glide bombs in the past week, he said. Most of the drones launched overnight were Russian-Iranian-type suicide drones, he said.

Ukrainian defence minister Rustem Umerov told reporters on Friday that Russia had increased its combined missile and drone strikes in recent months. Moscow’s aim is “to exhaust our air defence”, he said, “and apply psychological pressure”.

Ukraine had been “systematically working for years” on finding effective solutions to counter the Iranian-designed attack drones, Umerov said.

“It has been a constant intellectual struggle.” he said, due to Russia’s ever-evolving tactics. The Russian drones based on Iran’s Shahed design now fly faster and higher, above the range of Ukraine’s mobile air defence units. The drones also pack a larger warhead than the original ones first used in October 2022.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s top commander, Oleksandr Syrsky, warned that on the eastern battlefields, Russian troops were “attempting to break through our defences and advance in three operational directions”.

Aided by powerful glide bombs and unjammable fibre optic drones, Russian forces have advanced there at the fastest pace since November and are threatening to encircle the strategic eastern cities of Kostyantynivka and Pokrovsk.

Further north, Moscow’s troops are pushing from Russia’s Kursk region into Ukraine’s Sumy region, and are nearly within artillery range of the regional capital.

Senior Ukrainian officials told the Financial Times that they expected Russia’s ground offensive and air campaign to further intensify over the summer.

“Putin long ago decided he would keep waging war, despite the world’s calls for peace,” Zelenskyy said on X.

Zelenskyy also signed a decree on Sunday to withdraw Ukraine from the Ottawa Convention, which bars the production and use of anti-personnel mines.

Roman Kostenko, a member of parliament and military commander, said parliamentary approval will be needed to finalise the withdrawal, but called it “a step long demanded by the reality of war”.

“Russia is not a party to this convention and uses mines extensively against our military and civilians,” he wrote on Facebook. “We cannot remain bound by restrictions when the enemy faces none.”

Welcome to our live coverage of President Donald Trump’s push to advance his agenda through Congress in one “big, beautiful bill” — and do so in time for a self-imposed July 4 deadline.

If you’re just catching up, here’s what to know:

Senate Republicans clear a hurdle: After an hourslong push by Senate GOP leaders yesterday, the giant tax cuts and spending bill advanced from a key procedural vote in the upper chamber, 51-49.

In a late-night post on social media, Trump declared a “GREAT VICTORY,” offering praise to four Republicans who shifted their votes.

What happens next: Republican leaders must now satisfy numerous holdouts in the party still demanding changes to the bill.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, are forcing a major delay tactic, forcing clerks to spend an estimated 10 to 15 hours reading aloud the entire bill. After the reading, there would be debate on the bill, followed by a marathon “vote-a-rama” before a vote on final passage.

The vote-a-rama is another headache for GOP leadership: The open-ended, hourslong series of votes on amendments will be offered mostly by Democrats and put Republicans on the spot. At least one Republican holdout, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, has signaled she will offer her own amendments to the bill in an unusual move for a GOP bill.

What’s in the bill: Trump’s multitrillion-dollar bill would lower federal taxes and infuse more money into the Pentagon and border security agencies, while downsizing government safety-net programs including Medicaid.

Read a fact check on some of Trump’s claims about the measure, and compare what we know so far about the House and Senate versions of the bill.

The timeline is extremely tight: Trump has demanded to sign the bill on the Fourth of July, but the measure must still go back to the House if it passes the Senate.

Saturday’s vote allows the Senate to begin debating Trump’s bill, teeing up a final passage vote in that chamber as soon as Monday.

CNN’s Nicky Robertson and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.

The world’s leading economies have agreed a deal to spare the US’s largest companies from paying more corporate tax overseas, throwing into doubt the status of the biggest global tax deal in over a century.

The agreement between Washington and other members of the G7 group of leading countries could fundamentally alter a landmark 2021 accord to set up a global minimum tax to crack down on avoidance by multinationals.

The G7 said on Saturday it had agreed to a “side-by-side solution” of taxation that would exempt American companies from some parts of the new global tax regime because of the taxes they pay in the US.

The G7 added that the agreement would “facilitate further progress to stabilise the international tax system”, including “constructive dialogue” on preserving “the tax sovereignty of all countries”.

The new arrangements are set to be discussed in the coming weeks at the OECD, the international organisation that reached the 2021 minimum tax accord but is dominated by G7 members, according to people familiar with the discussions. 

Mathias Cormann, secretary-general of the OECD, described the G7 statement as “an important milestone in international tax co-operation”.

“This is a slam dunk for the United States,” said Robert Goulder, a tax attorney and contributing editor at Tax Analysts, a news service for tax professionals. “I think they’re celebrating by doing high-fives over at the Treasury.”

The shift came after the US included provisions in President Donald Trump’s sweeping “big beautiful bill”, referred to as Section 899, that would have allowed the US to retaliate against alleged discriminatory taxation elsewhere by imposing “revenge taxes” on foreign investments.

Ahead of the G7 statement, Treasury secretary Scott Bessent said he would ask Congress to remove the revenge tax measures from the US legislation because of the impending changes to the OECD deal.

He added that those revisions would save US companies $100bn in tax payments to foreign governments over the next decade.

UK chancellor Rachel Reeves said on Saturday that the G7 agreed that “there is work to be done in tackling aggressive tax planning and avoidance and ensuring a level-playing field”.

“The right environment for this work to happen is without the prospect of retaliatory taxation hanging over these talks, so the removal of Section 899 is welcome,” she added.

Markus Meinzer, director of policy at the Tax Justice Network, a campaign group, labelled the G7 deal a “hasty cave-in” that would leave the minimum tax deal “dead”.

He added: “The US is trying to exempt itself by arm-twisting others, which would make the tax deal entirely useless. A ship with a US-sized hole in its hull won’t float.”

But Manal Corwin, head of tax at the OECD, described the G7 statement as nonbinding, adding that any proposal would need to be approved by 147 countries at the OECD level.

“The G7 on their own cannot make this call,” she added.

The OECD agreement to establish a global minimum tax was reached by more than 135 countries in 2021 to prevent tax avoidance by multinationals and update the international tax system for a digital age.

It established a minimum tax rate of 15 per cent of global profits on the largest multinationals from the US and elsewhere, which was implemented by several countries last year.

Under provisions that particularly angered Republicans in the US, the OECD agreement allowed other countries to levy top up taxes on American companies deemed to be “undertaxed”.

But the OECD rejects the idea that other countries may now back out of the global minimum tax — or that US companies would be at an advantage to businesses from other countries that have adopted the regime.

“If anything, where we were before was uncertainty and an inability to move forward because of various threats of retaliation, that made it very hard and risked abandonment [of the minimum tax],” Corwin said.

She argued that any idea of the US tax system being a “light touch” was “not necessarily accurate”, maintaining that there were “many ways” in which it was stricter.

A French official added that the G7 accord had “made some nods to the US, [by] saying their tax law is helping them being compliant” with the OECD deal “which is a concession but . . . worth it”.

But Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel economics laureate who is also co-chair of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation, said the G7 accord was an indication that governments had “put the interests of multinationals ahead of those of small and medium businesses, their own citizens and average people around the planet”.

He added: “It is unacceptable that some governments are choosing to give up public revenues — especially now, and precisely from the most powerful economic actors.”

The G7 statement also anticipated continuing discussions on the taxation of the digital economy. Digital services taxes have been a point of tension between the US and other countries keen to increase levies on American tech giants.

Donald Trump, US president, said on Friday that he was cancelling trade talks with Canada after Ottawa said it would impose a new tax on tech companies.