Morning Brussels.
Angela Skujins sending you this newsletter on this scorching Thursday. Temperatures are set to soar across the continent, with no exception in the Belgian capital, as the country joined a longer list of nations to issue alerts due to the extreme heat.
Things are also expected to heat up almost 1,300 kilometres away in the Polish city of Gdańsk for the Ukraine Recovery Conference. NATO’s top boss Mark Rutte also continued a two-day trip to Washington, DC, using charts for dramatic effect, where things could also get spicy. And a high-ranking EU official will pay a visit to the Mediterranean island country of Malta to discuss the hotly-discussed issue of corruption.
First, let’s start with Ukraine.
As my colleague Sasha Vakulina wrote in an expected play-by-play published this morning, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s absence from the two-day affair starting today could become the conference’s most significant political moment.
