Russia’s defence ministry on Tuesday released video footage showing Viktor Sokolov, the commander of the Black Sea fleet, a day after Ukraine claimed that Sokolov was killed in an attack on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol. In a video published by the defence ministry, Sokolov was shown apparently taking part in a video conference with the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and other top admirals and army chiefs. Ukraine’s special forces said on Monday they had killed Sokolov, Moscow’s top admiral in Crimea, along with 33 other officers in a missile attack last week.
An overnight Russian air strike on the key Ukrainian grain exporting port of Izmail injured two people and damaged infrastructure, the governor of the Odesa region said on Tuesday. A port building, storage facilities and more than 30 trucks and cars were damaged in the attack, which lasted more than two hours, Oleh Kiper said.
The Ukrainian military reported shooting down 26 of the 38 Iranian-made attack drones it said were launched by Russia. Separately on Tuesday, a Russian missile strike also damaged a local enterprise in the southern Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, its mayor, Oleksandr Vilkul, said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
Natalia Humeniuk, spokesperson for Ukraine’s military in the south, has said that the Orlivka-Isaccea border crossing point between Ukraine and Romania is closed due to the overnight Russian drone attack. She told Radio Svoboda that drones did not cross into Romania.
Ukrainian MP Kira Rudik has called for an urgent upgrade in the air defence around Odesa, after repeated Russian attacks.
Regional authorities have stated that two people were injured in a Russian attack on Kherson earlier this morning. Ukraine’s emergency services in Kherson have reported that in the last 24 hours they have had to deal with 22 separate fires that have broken out after Russian shelling.
Tass reports that seven settlements in the Kursk region have lost power after a Ukrainian drone dropped explosives on to an electricity sub-station.
A cargo vessel left a Ukrainian Black Sea port on Tuesday after loading, an industry source has told Reuters, without giving any further details. Kyiv has tried to establish a temporary “humanitarian corridor” hugging the coastline, and two bulk carriers left the port of Chornomorsk last week using it. In July the UN and Turkey-brokered deal which allowed Ukraine to export grain collapsed after Russia withdrew.
Polish experts have confirmed that the missile that killed two people at a grain facility in southern Poland in November was fired by Ukraine, Rzeczpospolita daily reported, citing sources. The explosion of the missile in Nato-member Poland fuelled fears that the war in Ukraine could spiral into a wider conflict by triggering the alliance’s mutual defence clause, but at the time Warsaw and Nato said that they believed that it was a Ukrainian stray, easing worries about escalation. Sources with knowledge of the investigation told Rzeczpospolita that Poland had established that the missile that landed in the village of Przewodów was an S 300 5-W-55 air-defence missile fired from Ukrainian territory. Rzeczpospolita reported that the Ukrainian side has not made any material available to Polish investigators. Ukraine has denied one of its missiles landed in Poland.
Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko said that on 15 October he will meet in Kyrgyzstan with Vladimir Putin.
Ukraine claimed on Monday that it had killed Adm Viktor Sokolov, the commander of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, along with 33 other officers, in one of Kyiv’s boldest attacks yet on the occupied peninsula of Crimea. The Ukrainian military said Friday’s attack on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol was timed to coincide with a meeting of naval officials.
Fragments of a missile were found in a village in Moldova’s breakaway Transnistria region on Monday after a major Russian aerial attack on neighbouring Ukraine overnight, regional authorities said. The pro-Moscow separatist region broke away after a brief civil war after the collapse of the Soviet Union and is not recognised internationally. “An S-300 missile warhead … fell in [the village of] Chitcani, near a house, and got stuck in the ground,” Oleg Belyakov, co-chairman of a commission in charge of peacekeeping operations in Transnistria, told Russia’s state-run TASS news agency.
A UN investigation into human rights violations in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion warned that evidence indicates the use of torture by Russian forces has been “widespread and systematic”.
