A woman stands near her destroyed car near an old mill, built around 1885, also destroyed during a Russian missile attack in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Oct. 14, 2022. (Reuters)Russia-Ukraine War News highlights: The Kerch bridge, a vital link between the annexed Crimean peninsula and southern Russia, which was damaged in a massive explosion last week, won’t be repaired until next summer, a document published on the Russian government’s website said, as per agency reports.
Meanwhile, billionaire Elon Musk said on Friday his rocket company SpaceX cannot indefinitely fund its Starlink internet service in Ukraine, which has helped the country’s civilians and military stay online during the war with Russia. Musk’s comment on Twitter came after a media report that SpaceX had asked the Pentagon to pay for the donations of Starlink. Last week, Musk was involved in an online fight with Ukrainian officials over a peace plan he put forward which Ukraine said is too generous to Russia.
The Biden administration will send Ukraine a new $725 million package of weapons and other military assistance, the White House said, as the US added to a flurry of aid announcements from European allies this week. Saudi Arabia will provide $400 million in humanitarian aid to Ukraine, Saudi state news agency SPA said, adding that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made a phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday.
File photo of a teacher visits a basement beneath a school in Kyiv, prepared as a shelter and classroom in the weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. (Lynsey Addario/The New York Times)
With Russia’s war in Ukraine in its eighth month, some European nations that have funnelled weapons to Kyiv are running low on their own supplies which could create vulnerabilities, Bloomberg reported.
A fuel depot in Russia's Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, caught fire after shelling on Saturday, its governor said, without specifying the origin of the shelling.
Russian border regions including Belgorod have accused Ukraine of attacking targets including power lines and fuel stores since Moscow sent its armed forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24. There was no immediate comment from Kyiv. (Reuters)
A missile strike seriously damaged a key energy facility in Ukraine's capital region, the country's power system operator said Saturday as the Russian military strove to cut water and electricity in populated areas. Kyiv region Gov. Oleksiy Kuleba said the strike did not kill or wound anyone.
Electricity transmission company Ukrenergo said repair crews were working to restore power but warned residents about possible outages.(AP)
Russia should finish calling up reservists in two weeks, President Vladimir Putin said, promising an end to a divisive mobilisation that has seen hundreds of thousands of men summoned to fight in Ukraine and huge numbers flee the country.
The defence ministry in Belarus said on Saturday that the first convoys of Russian servicemen, part of a "regional grouping" of troops, had arrived in Belarus. President Alexander Lukashenko said this week that his troops would deploy with Russian forces near the Ukrainian border. (AP)
They exploded with dull thuds on the outskirts of towns and detonated in the center of cities with deafening booms. Strikes in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, left cars burning and splatters of blood on the sidewalks.
Throughout this week, the Russian military fired its most intensive barrage of missiles at Ukraine since the start of the war in February, killing three dozen civilians, knocking out electricity and overwhelming air defenses. One thing the missiles did not do was change the course of the ground war.
Fought mostly in trenches, with the most intense combat now in an area of rolling hills and pine forests in the east and on the open plains in the south, these battles are where control of territory is decided — and where Russia’s military continued to lose ground, despite its missile strikes. Read More.
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The 34-year-old Idaho man died on Tuesday from injuries sustained during during a Russian attack in Luhansk. A former US Army infantryman, Partridge felt “spiritually called” to volunteer with the Ukranian military as they defend the country from invading Russian forces, his sister Jenny Corry said.
He flew to Poland on a one-way ticket in April, his rucksack packed with body armour, a helmet and other tactical gear. Partridge and his fellow soldiers were in Severodonetsk, a city in the Luhansk region, when he was hit in the head with shrapnel during an attack by Russian fighting vehicles, Corry said.
Partridge leaves behind five young children. (AP)
Forecasting the direction of the volatile energy markets has never been easy. But experts say the complexity of market forces brewing now, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, makes it especially difficult to predict the direction of both energy prices and the industry.
“I’ve never seen such a spicy bouillabaisse of ingredients that could wreak havoc on energy prices,” said Tom Kloza, the global head of energy analysis at Oil Price Information Service. “You have to look and say that the world changed on Feb. 24,” the day of the Russian invasion.
Beside an abandoned Russian military camp in eastern Ukraine, the body of a man lay decomposing in the grass — a civilian who had fallen victim to a tripwire land mine set by retreating Russian forces.
Nearby, a group of Ukrainian deminers with the country’s territorial defense forces worked to clear the area of dozens of other deadly mines and unexploded ordnance — a push to restore a semblance of safety to the cities, towns and countryside in a region that spent months under Russian occupation.
The deminers, part of the 113th Kharkiv Defense Brigade of Ukraine’s territorial defense forces, walked deep into fallow agricultural lands on Thursday along a muddy road between fields of dead sunflowers overgrown with high weeds.
➡️ Saudi Arabia will provide $400 million in humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told President Volodymyr Zelenskiy the kingdom was ready to continue efforts of mediation and support everything that contributes to de-escalation, said Saudi state news agency SPA.
➡️ International Monetary Fund member countries issued a near-unanimous call for Russia to end its war in Ukraine, but Moscow again blocked consensus on issuing a joint communique on the single biggest factor fuelling inflation and slowing the global economy, officials said.
➡️ Some of oilfield service firm Schlumberger's more than 9,000 Russian employees have begun receiving military draft notices through work, and the company is not authorising remote employment to escape mobilisation, according to people familiar with the matter and internal documents.
➡️ Sweden has rejected plans to set up a formal joint investigation team with Denmark and Germany to look into last month's ruptures of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, said a Swedish prosecutor investigating the leaks. (Reuters)
Ukraine’s capital region was struck by Iranian-made kamikaze drones early Thursday (October 14), Ukrainian officials said. The Deputy head of the presidential office Kyrylo Tymoshenko said “critical infrastructure facilities” in the area were hit, The Associated Press reported. The extent of damage was not elaborated on by officials.
Three drones struck the small town of Makariv, situated west of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. These kamikaze drones are not new, and have also been supplied by the US to Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shakes hands with an injured Ukrainian serviceman in a hospital, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, during the Defender of Ukraine Day in Kyiv, Ukraine, Oct. 14, 2022.
Ukrainian engineers have restored "much needed" back-up power to a key Russian-occupied nuclear power plant after shelling robbed it of access to external electricity twice in the past week, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog said on Friday.
Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the operating staff at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, "working in very challenging conditions," were doing everything they could to bolster the plant's off-site power, essential for ensuring nuclear safety.
"Restoring the back-up power connection is a positive step in this regard, even though the overall nuclear safety and security situation remains precarious," Grossi said in a statement released at IAEA headquarters in Vienna. (Reuters)
➡️ Russia does not need to unleash massive new strikes on Ukraine at the moment, Putin said, after days of raining missiles on cities including Kyiv and amid speculation that Moscow's supplies of precision weapons may be depleted.
➡️ Russian-backed forces have made tactical advances in the last three days towards the centre of Bakhmut, a strategically important town in the eastern Donetsk region, and likely advanced into villages south of the town, Britain said.
➡️ Ukrainian investigators have completed the exhumation of soldiers in one of two mass graves discovered after Russian troops retreated from the town of Lyman in eastern Donetsk region, police said.
➡️ Ukraine's armed forces have re-taken more than 600 settlements in the past month, including 75 in the strategic Kherson region, the government said.
➡️ Damage to the bridge between the annexed Crimean peninsula and southern Russia won't be repaired until next summer, a document published on the Russian government's website said, after an explosion last week. (Reuters)
Elon Musk said Friday his rocket company SpaceX cannot indefinitely fund its Starlink internet service in Ukraine, which has helped the country’s civilians and military stay online during the war with Russia.
Musk’s comment on Twitter came after a media report that SpaceX had asked the Pentagon to pay for the donations of Starlink. The billionaire has been in online fights with Ukrainian officials over a peace plan he put forward which Ukraine says is too generous to Russia.
A senior defense official told reporters on Friday that the US Department of Defense would not confirm that ongoing talks with the company were related to payment, but said the Pentagon was “continuing to talk to SpaceX and other companies about SATCOM capabilities.”
The United States will send munitions and military vehicles to Ukraine as part of a new $725 million security assistance package aimed at bolstering the country's defense against the Russian invasion, the Defense Department said Friday.
The package is the first since Russia's barrage of missiles fired on civilian population centers in Ukraine this week. It will bring the total of US security assistance since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 to more than $17.5 billion.
The contents of the latest package, first reported by Reuters, includes high-speed anti-radiation missiles (HARMs) and precision-guided artillery as well as medical supplies, the Defense Department said in a statement. (Reuters)
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday India and China favour peaceful dialogue in Ukraine, a month after their leaders appeared to differ with him over the conflict at a summit in Uzbekistan last month.
"India and China always talk about the need to establish dialogue and resolve everything peacefully, we know their position. These are our close allies, partners, and we respect their position. But we also know the position of Kyiv; they keep saying that they want negotiations and it seems like they asked for it, and now they have made an official decision that prohibits negotiations." (Reuters)
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday there was no need for massive new strikes on Ukraine and that Russia was not looking to destroy the country.
Putin told a news conference at the end of a summit in Kazakhstan that his call-up of Russian reservists would be over within two weeks and there were no plans for a further mobilisation. He also repeated the Kremlin position that Russia was willing to hold talks, although he said they would require international mediation if Ukraine was prepared to take part.
Taken together, Putin's comments appeared to suggest a slight softening of his tone as the war nears the end of its eighth month, after weeks of Ukrainian advances and significant Russian defeats. Wall Street shares opened higher as traders interpreted them as easing geopolitical tensions. (Reuters)