Kremlin says Russia will continue air strikes on Ukraine and that Ukraine's policy is not aimed at negotiations.

The Wall Street Journal reports the US and Qatar are drafting a plan to let Iran access part of roughly $100bn in frozen cash, starting with a $6bn tranche held by Qatar for humanitarian purchases. The proposal, not final, would allow Iran’s central bank to use extracted frozen assets—chiefly oil-export proceeds held abroad—to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian goods; the mechanism could be a template for other frozen cash pools and could serve as the first disbursement toward about $24bn Tehran is seeking to unfreeze under a recently signed end-of-war agreement.

Guangdong provincial government issued an implementation plan to expand and upgrade the services sector, aiming to seize AI opportunities to build an internationally competitive software and information technology services innovation center. The plan calls for cultivating and attracting more software firms with core competitiveness and building a cohort of nationally leading digital-transformation service providers.