Iranian-Swedish citizen Saeed Azizi also exchanged for Hamid Noury, who was serving life in Sweden for role in death of political prisoners

Johan Floderus, the Swedish EU diplomat held in captivity for two years in Iran, has been freed and is on his way home, the Swedish prime minister announced.

Ulf Kristersson said on Saturday that the Iranian lifer Hamid Noury was being exchanged for Johan Floderus and the Iranian-Swedish citizen Saeed Azizi.

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Marine Le Pen’s party is breaking record high scores across vast areas of the country, polls show, with an increase in its influence inevitable

It is 8pm on Sunday 7 July. Polling stations have just closed after the second round of snap French parliamentary elections – the country’s most momentous ballot in living memory – and the first estimations flash up on the nation’s TV screens.

President Emmanuel Macron has lost his gamble . The National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen has more than trebled its tally of deputies in the assemblée nationale to just over 290: an absolute majority. France’s next government will be far right.

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Ahead of the peace summit in Switzerland, German chancellor Olaf Scholz said Putin’s comments were intended as a distraction

We are restarting our rolling coverage of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Much of the focus will be around the Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland, the largest such event since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. We will bring you the latest updates throughout the day.

G7 leaders did not discuss Vladimir Putin’s proposals for peace in Ukraine since everyone knew they were not serious, Olaf Scholz said shortly before leaving for Switzerland, where a Ukraine conference opens on Saturday.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy arrived in Switzerland on Friday ahead of the two-day Ukraine peace summit . Zelenskiy said talks would focus on nuclear safety, food security, the return of prisoners of war and Ukrainian children taken to Russian-controlled territory.

Kamala Harris, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the leaders of Germany, Italy, Britain, Canada and Japan are among those set to attend the Swiss summit in Lucerne. Despite months of Ukrainian and Swiss lobbying, some others will not be there, most notably China. The gathering comes after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said Moscow would only enter peace talks after Ukraine pulls its troops out of the east and south of the country – a plan which Zelenskiy has dismissed.

On the ground in Ukraine, a Russian airstrike killed one person and injured at least four in the northern Sumy region on Friday, the military administration there said. The strike hit the town of Shostka, about 45km (28 miles) from the border with Russia, it said on Telegram, giving no details about damage. The strike came as Kyiv and Moscow staged dozens of drone and missile attacks overnight on Thursday and during Friday.

Ukrainian attacks on southern Russia’s Belgorod region killed six people on Friday, officials said. Four bodies were pulled from the rubble of a multi-floor apartment building hit by Ukrainian shelling in the border town of Shebekino, Russia’s emergencies ministry said, adding after midnight that 50% of the rubble had been cleared. A Ukrainian drone struck a car in a village near Shebekino, killing the driver, said the regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov. He said a woman was killed in her home when it was struck by rocket fire in the village of Oktyabrsky, farther west.

Russia launched 17 missiles and nearly 500 drones on Friday , Ukraine’s general staff said. Drone attacks killed a 54-year-old man in the southern Kherson region and injured a 17-year-old girl in the eastern city of Dnipro, regional authorities said. Three people were injured in a drone attack in the eastern Sumy region and several homes damaged in the neighbouring Kharkiv region.

The EU has ramped up its production of projectiles and will match Russia’s production capacity next year , the bloc’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, told French news outlet La Tribune.

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The Le Pen family drama, Éric Ciotti apparently locking himself in his office … it would almost be funny if it weren’t so bleak

Éric Ciotti, exit stage right. On 11 June, the leader of France’s legacy centre-right party Les Républicains (LR) went on TV to finally set the record straight. With France’s leftwing parties negotiating a “ popular front ” in the lead-up to the snap elections on 30 June and 7 July, Ciotti announced that he would seek an unprecedented alliance with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) after its commanding victory in last Sunday’s elections to the European parliament.

This was the latest turning point provoked by Emmanuel Macron’s surprise dissolution of parliament on Sunday, which has provoked a major political crisis likely to result in a shake-up of political forces and loyalties. Of course, the old centre-right had long since embraced the hallmarks of Le Pen-style politics – from the obsessive fear of national decline and culture wars against French Muslims to to embracing the so-called “ great replacement ” theory. But the custodian party of what the French still like to call “ Gaullism ” has clung to an at least rhetorical rejection of the Le Pen family’s political project. The National Rally is the rebranded form of the Front National , the party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen and other neo-fascists in 1972 as they nursed the wounds of Charles de Gaulle’s recognition of defeat in France’s colonial war over Algeria.

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Authorities caught up with woman alleged to have sailed dinghy to off-limits shore after she posted videos about it

A Dubai-based influencer has been fined €1,800 for trespassing on an off-limits pink-tinged beach in Sardinia before sharing a series of video clips and photos of her escapade on social media.

The woman arrived by dinghy on the shore of Spiaggia Rosa, a beach famous for its pink sand on the tiny Sardinian island of Budelli, allegedly ignoring all the prohibition signs, according to reports in the Italian press .

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President’s move viewed as ‘Russian roulette’ after far-right support reached record high in European elections

France’s prime minister, Gabriel Attal, stared ahead with his arms folded while another minister covered his face with his hands as Emmanuel Macron gathered top government figures at the Élysée last Sunday to make the shock announcement that he would dissolve parliament and call a snap legislative election in the wake of a win at the polls by Marine Le Pen’s party. The mood, said Attal, was “grave”.

One senior centrist figure said this week they had not slept properly since the announcement of a campaign that will be the shortest in modern French history at barely three weeks. Some party supporters said their world had been turned upside down. “We’re going to get out there and do our best,” said a government minister.

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2016 Euros was last tournament where people could travel freely, making it hard to judge how current fans will behave

German police have spoken of concerns about an intelligence gap in the level of aggression of the latest generation of England football fan, as supporters gather in Germany for the first post-Covid Euros.

England’s Sunday evening tie against Serbia in their first game of Euro 2024 has been designated as “high risk” due to a heightened threat of violence between two groups of supporters with a history of thuggery.

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More than 100 leaders at two-day conference to discuss Kyiv’s proposals to end war – but Russia and China absent

More than 100 leaders, including the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, and the presidents or heads of the EU, South American, Middle East and Asian countries, will gather in Switzerland on Saturday for one of the most ambitious attempts yet to forge a peace plan for Ukraine.

The summit comes as G7 leaders gathering in Italy clinch a new deal for a €50bn loan for Ukraine, securitised through use of the windfall profits from the interest on Russian central bank assets frozen by the EU and other western nations after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

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UK prime minister says he sees ‘eye-to-eye’ with his Italian counterpart on the issue of migration

Rishi Sunak has praised his “fantastic” Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni as he announced the launch of a G7 coalition to tackle people-smuggling.

The prime minister, who is in Puglia in Italy for the G7 summit, said he and Meloni saw “eye to eye” on the issue and had spearheaded efforts to tackle it since they were elected.

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