Closing summary...
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, will meet his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Beijing for talks on Wednesday, the Kremlin has confirmed. It will be the Russian president’s first trip outside the former Soviet Union since the international criminal court issued a warrant for him in March over the deportation of children from Ukraine. Russia’s top diplomat, Sergei Lavrov, arrived in Beijing on Monday.
Slovakia’s populist former prime minister, Robert Fico, and his party signed a coalition deal to form a new government expected to reduce support to Ukraine, Reuters reported. Fico, a three-time prime minister last in power in 2018, won an election on 30 September with pledges to halt military aid to Ukraine.
The US treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said support for Ukraine remained a “top priority” for the US and Europe, reaffirming the Biden administration’s commitment to support Kyiv “for as long as it takes”. Yellen told reporters that Joe Biden would submit a supplemental funding request for Ukraine and Israel “as soon as we have a functional House of Representatives”.
A days-long attempt by Russian forces to storm a strategically important city in eastern Ukraine appears to be waning, Kyiv officials have claimed. Ukrainian forces repelled 15 Russian attacks from four directions on Avdiivka over the previous 24 hours, the Ukrainian general staff said on Monday. These claims have not been independently verified.
Reuters reported that Russia launched five missiles and 12 kamikaze drones at Ukraine in an overnight attack, Ukraine’s air force said early on Monday.
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The Kremlin said:
Vladimir Putin informed (Netanyahu) about the steps Russia is taking to help normalize the situation, prevent further escalation of violence and prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip.
Earlier on Monday, Putin discussed the crisis with the leaders of Iran, Egypt, Syria and the Palestinian Authority and said any form of violence against civilians was unacceptable, the Kremlin said.
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has held a phone call with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Reuters reports.
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Reuters has some comments made by the US treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, after the meeting with euro zone finance ministers (see earlier post at 13.39) concluded.
Yellen told reporters that Joe Biden would submit a supplemental funding request for Ukraine and Israel “as soon as we have a functional House of Representatives”.
She acknowledged some opposition in Congress, but expressed confidence that US aid would continue.
Yellen told reporters:
Is there some opposition in Congress? Yes there is.
But there’s a strong bipartisan majority in favour of this. It is the president’s top priority and I absolutely believe that we will get this done.
Biden has requested $24bn in additional funding for Ukraine but this hangs in limbo.
Although the White House has said the vast majority of House Republicans still support such assistance, there has been growing dissent in recent weeks and the issue was a factor in Kevin McCarthy’s downfall as US House speaker.
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Russia’s top diplomat, Sergei Lavrov, arrived in Beijing on Monday before an expected visit by Vladimir Putin, which will raise western concerns about increasingly close links between the two powers, writes Jason Burke.
China has historically backed the Palestinian cause for decades, as did the USSR throughout the cold war. More recently, both powers have sought to balance closer ties with Israel with their broader diplomatic efforts to win allies in the Arab world and more broadly.
Russia is seeking support for its continuing war in Ukraine while China wants to build a broader coalition of developing countries to extend Beijing’s influence and reinforce its efforts to compete with the US on the global stage.
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'International issues' will form focus of talks between Putin and Xi on Wednesday
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, will meet his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Beijing for talks on Wednesday, the Kremlin has confirmed.
The talks will take place on the sidelines of a forum marking a decade of China’s belt and road initiative, the Kremlin said.
“During the talks, special attention will be paid to international and regional issues,” it said, without elaborating.
It will be the Russian president’s first trip outside the former Soviet Union since the international criminal court issued a warrant for him in March over the deportation of children from Ukraine.
Putin has increasingly turned to Beijing for trade and political support since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February.
China and Russia declared a “no limits” partnership in February 2022 when Putin visited Beijing just days before he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine.
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Russia’s drones are mostly sourced from China and Moscow will spend more than $618m on a new national project to develop drone manufacturing, finance minister Anton Siluanov has said.
Siluanov said:
We are spending additional money on drones – and more than 60 billion roubles on a new national project to develop our own drone base.
The task is that 41% of all drones by 2025 should have the label ‘Made in Russia’.
Today, drones are mainly from the People’s Republic of China.
Drones have played a major part in the war in Ukraine, being used for attacks and reconnaissance.
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Slovakia’s pro-Russia former PM seals coalition deal for new government
Slovakia’s populist former prime minister, Robert Fico, and his party have signed a coalition deal to form a new government expected to reduce support to Ukraine, Reuters reports.
Fico, a three-time prime minister last in power in 2018, won an election on 30 September with pledges to halt military aid to Ukraine, while taking a hard line on rising illegal migration and a surge in prices.
He has backed peace talks for Ukraine as it battles Russia’s invasion – a line similar to that of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, but rejected by Kyiv as one that would only encourage Russian aggression.
Fico’s leftist, populist Smer-SD party struck a deal last week with the centre-left Hlas and nationalist Slovak National Party to form a coalition that will have 79 out of 150 seats in parliament.
Monday’s pact, which can allow the president to appoint the new government, agreed the breakdown of cabinet positions, giving Smer-SD the defence, finance, foreign and justice ministries. Hlas will get parliament’s speaker role, Reuters reports.
You can find out more about who Robert Fico is in this profile:
Alexei Miller, the head of Gazprom, and Igor Sechin, the CEO of Russian oil company Rosneft, will be in Vladimir Putin’s delegation during his visit to China this week, RIA news agency reported on Monday.
Russia hopes to break through Ukrainian defences in the Kupiansk-Lyman sector of the frontline in north-eastern Ukraine, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces said on Monday, Reuters reports.
Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi was shown in video footage posted on the Telegram messaging app telling soldiers that the situation on the north-eastern frontline had “significantly escalated” in recent days, and the Russian military wanted “revenge” by retaking territory it once occupied in the area.
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Reuters reports the German finance minister, Christian Lindner, said on Monday it was indispensable that the US continues to participate in meeting Ukraine’s financial needs.
“The transatlantic partnership is of paramount importance for Europe as a whole, not only in economic terms, but especially because of our shared values,” Lindner said.
The US secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, was meeting EU finance ministers in Luxembourg.
Yellen said on Monday that support for Ukraine remained a “top priority” for the US and Europe, calling it crucial to underpin Ukraine’s military battle against Russia’s invasion.
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Ukraine has called for Russia to be excluded from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), warning the body faced a “slow death” if Moscow remained a member.
AFP reports:
The OSCE was founded to ease tensions between east and west during the cold war, and helps its members coordinate on issues like human rights and arms control.
“Everything Russia does in the OSCE nowadays is killing this organisation,” Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said at a press conference also attended by OSCE chair Bujar Osmani.
“The situation in the OSCE is very complicated, painful, but the choice is very simple – either a slow death with Russia, or a new life without it,” Kuleba said.
Ukraine has repeatedly called for Russia to be excluded from international organisations over its full-scale invasion, including the G20, UN security council and all major sporting bodies.
Russia has itself repeatedly accused the west of trying to undermine and “seize” the OSCE, arguing the group has turned away from its founding principles.
The organisation sends observers to conflicts, as well as elections around the world. It also runs programmes that aim to combat human trafficking and ensure media freedom.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, it has struggled to operate as Russia has blocked all major decisions, which require consensus.
Ukraine remains 'top priority' for US and Europe, says treasury secretary
The US treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said support for Ukraine remained a “top priority” for the US and Europe, reaffirming the Biden administration’s commitment to support Kyiv “for as long as it takes”.
She said the administration would fight to ensure a bipartisan majority in Congress enacted “robust” and uninterrupted assistance for the country, Reuters reports.
“We cannot allow Ukraine to lose the war for economic reasons when it has shown an ability to succeed on the battlefield,” Yellen said in comments prepared for her third meeting with the Eurogroup eurozone finance ministers.
The meeting comes as the Biden administration prepares to push through a new military assistance package worth well over $2bn for both Ukraine and Israel.
Some Republicans in Congress, however, have questioned funding for Kyiv, including Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, who has been nominated to be House speaker and leads a hardline Republican party caucus backed by former president and likely 2024 nominee Donald Trump.
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Vladimir Putin will speak separately to the leaders of Israel, Iran, Syria and Egypt and the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Monday, Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov said.
Here are some of the latest images coming from the newswires out of Ukraine and Russia:
Avdiivka: Russia's assault on key Ukrainian city is weakening, say officials
A days-long attempt by Russian forces to storm a strategically important city in eastern Ukraine appears to be waning, Kyiv officials have claimed.
Ukrainian forces repelled 15 Russian attacks from four directions on Avdiivka over the previous 24 hours, the Ukrainian general staff said on Monday.
This figure compares with up to 60 attacks a day in the middle of last week, according to Vitalii Barabash, head of the city administration.
The reduction in attacks suggests the Russian effort to capture Avdiivka has “deflated”, the Associated Press quotes Barabash as having said. These claims are yet to be independently verified.
The location of Avdiivka, which lies in the northern suburbs of the city of Donetsk, grants Ukrainian forces artillery advantages over the city and could serve as a springboard for them to liberate Donetsk.
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Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has had a phone call with his Syrian counterpart, Bashar al-Assad, Russia’s TASS news agency quoted the Syrian leader’s office as saying on Monday.
Both Putin and Assad favoured the immediate delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, it quoted Assad’s office as saying.
Syria has been a staunch ally of Moscow since Russia launched a military campaign in Syria in 2015 that helped to turn the tide in a civil war in favour of the Syrian president with massive aerial bombardment of opposition-held areas.
Assad has described Russia’s war in Ukraine as a “correction of history”.
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Poland’s ruling populists appear to be heading for electoral defeat, in what would be one of the most consequential European political turnarounds of recent years, if exit polls showing a victory for an opposition coalition led by Donald Tusk prove correct.
The exit polls suggested that the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party received the most votes, but that Tusk’s Civic Coalition together with two other opposition parties should have a route to a parliamentary majority.
Tusk, who was Polish prime minister between 2007 and 2014 and then became European Council president for five years, declared victory almost immediately after polls closed on Sunday, claiming there was no route for PiS to claim a third term in office.
You can read the full story by my colleague, Shaun Walker, here:
PiS increased nationalist rhetoric in its campaign and even entered a row with its war-torn neighbour, Ukraine, despite huge Polish solidarity to help Kyiv in the face of the Russian invasion.
Whoever wins, Poland’s strong support for Ukraine is thought to be unlikely to change.
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Redut, the purported private military company, is recruiting mercenaries under the guise of “volunteers”, including former Wagner personnel, according to the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD).
In its latest intelligence update, the MoD said Redut is being utilised by the Russian Ministry of Defence to boost Russian regular forces.
Posting on X, the MoD wrote:
The Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate likely supervises and finances the group’s activities, including its recruitment.
Since the start of the invasion, Redut has been involved in combat operations in Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Luhansk oblasts. The group highly likely has over 7,000 personnel…
It is a realistic possibility that the Russian Ministry of Defence’s practise of recruiting through “volunteer” units has contributed to Russia avoiding further unpopular mobilisations.
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Summary of the day so far...
Here is a summary of the day's events so far:
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, will visit North Korea on a two-day visit on 18-19 October. The Russian foreign ministry announced the news on its website.
Russia launched five missiles and 12 kamikaze drones at Ukraine in an overnight attack, Ukraine’s air force said early on Monday, with officials reporting further artillery and airstrikes. Ukraine’s air force said the missiles, of which it shot down two, targeted northern and eastern regions, while the drones, of which 11 were downed, were launched in several directions with a particular focus on western Ukraine.
A top Ukrainian commander has said Russia’s biggest offensive in months on the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka is failing, adding that Kyiv’s own attempts to advance in the south were proving “difficult”. Russia has continued to deploy new forces in an attempt to surround the city, according to Vitaliy Barabash, the head of its military administration. Both Moscow and Washington have described the surge in violence around Avdiivka as a new Russian offensive.
At least six people have been killed in Russian attacks on Ukraine in the past 24 hours, local officials reported on Sunday. Two people were killed and three more injured in the Kherson area after more than 100 shells bombarded the region over the weekend, the local governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, wrote on social media, according to AP.
The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sunday that a new weapons package for Israel and Ukraine would be significantly more than $2bn. In an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, Sullivan said Joe Biden would have extensive talks with the US Congress this week on the need for the package to be approved.
Russian forces had improved their positions along almost the entire line of contact in Ukraine, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said on Sunday. Reuters reported that in a video posted to social media by the Kremlin journalist Pavel Zarubin, Putin said: “What is happening now along the entire length of the [line of] contact is called an active defence.”
Volodymyr Zelenskiy thanked troops in areas where fighting was “particularly hot”. In his regular address, he said: “I thank everyone who is holding their positions and destroying Russian troops”, citing Avdiivka, Maryinka and other key locations in the Donetsk region.
Ukraine was working to evacuate nearly 260 of its citizens from Gaza and to fly other Ukrainians out of Israel, Zelenskiy said on Sunday. Ukraine’s embassy in Israel said on social media on Saturday that 207 Ukrainian citizens, including 63 children, were evacuated from Tel Aviv to Romania on Saturday and that another flight would take 155 people to Romania on Sunday.
The US special representative for Ukraine's economic recovery, Penny Pritzker, has arrived in Kyiv.
A very warm welcome back to Kyiv, Secretary Pritzker! pic.twitter.com/h6S9dO7fyk
— Ambassador Bridget A. Brink (@USAmbKyiv) October 16, 2023
Reuters reports that Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov met with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on Monday, and exchanged views on the Israel-Hamas conflict, the Chinese foreign ministry said.
The urgent task is a ceasefire and building of a humanitarian aid channel, Wang said in the meeting.
Wang also urged China and Russia to deepen strategic mutual trust, his ministry said.
Reuters reports that Turkey is set to delay ratifying Sweden’s Nato bid until after October.
The Russian deputy prime minister, Alexander Novak, said on Monday that Russia was expecting a visit from the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro.
A source familiar with the plans told Reuters that the visit would take place by the end of the year.
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Russian foreign minister to visit North Korea this week
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, will visit North Korea on a two-day visit on 18-19 October, the Russian foreign ministry said on its website.
Updated
Reuters reports that the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Moscow’s planned withdrawal of its ratification of the global treaty banning nuclear tests does not mean that Russia intends to conduct such a test, Tass news agency reported on Monday.
Russia’s lower house of parliament, or State Duma, is set to vote on Tuesday on a bill to de-ratify the treaty.
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Russia launched five missiles and 12 drones into Ukraine overnight, air force says
Reuters reports that Russia launched five missiles and 12 kamikaze drones at Ukraine in an overnight attack, Ukraine’s air force said early on Monday, with officials reporting further artillery and airstrikes.
Ukraine’s air force said the missiles, of which it shot down two, targeted northern and eastern regions, while the drones, of which 11 were downed, were launched in several directions with a particular focus on western Ukraine.
The governor of the eastern region of Poltava, Filip Pronin, said the region had been attacked by drones and missiles, and that three civilians had been hospitalised as a result.
“Fortunately, no civilian or critical infrastructure was hit. However, missile fragments damaged several private homes,” he wrote on the Telegram messaging service.
Russia also carried out artillery shelling and airstrikes in the Zaporizhzhia region, damaging several residential buildings and infrastructure and injuring one elderly woman, the governor there said.
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Three Ukrainian children who had been taken to Russia are to be released to Qatari diplomats in Moscow this week under a mechanism Qatar has set up with the goal of returning many more children from Russia to Ukraine, a Qatari official briefed on the plans told Reuters on Monday.
Qatar on Friday facilitated the return of another Ukrainian child, aged seven, who was reunited with his grandmother and is en route to Ukraine via Estonia, the official said. The three other children are a boy aged two, a nine-year-old boy, and a girl aged 17.
Kyiv has identified 20,000 children as taken to Russia or Russian-held territory without the consent of family or guardians.
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A Russian governor was accused by critics on Sunday of discrediting Russia’s armed forces after telling residents in her region that the country had “no need” for its war in Ukraine.
Natalya Komarova, the governor of the Khanty-Mansiysk region and a member of President Vladimir Putin’s governing United Russia party, made the remarks during a meeting with residents in the Siberian city of Nizhnevartovsk on Saturday.
Critics have called for authorities to launch an investigation into her remarks, but Komarova has not been detained or faced any charges so far.
A video of the event posted on social media showed the politician being confronted by the wife of a Russian soldier who said mobilised men had been poorly equipped for the frontline.
Komarova told residents that Russia had not been prepared for the invasion of Ukraine.
“Are you asking me (why your husband does not have equipment), knowing that I’m the governor and not the minister of defence?”, the 67-year-old said.
“As a whole, we did not prepare for this war. We don’t need it. We were building a completely different world, so in this regard, there will certainly be some inconsistencies and unresolved issues,” she added.
Komarova’s comments spread quickly online, reportedly prompting pro-war activists to denounce the politician to authorities for “discrediting Russia’s armed forces”.
The news outlet Sibir.Realii reported that its journalists had seen a letter from the Yuri Ryabtsev, the director of a Siberian non-profit organisation, to Russia’s minister of internal affairs, calling for a further investigation of Komarova’s comments.
Days after Putin sent troops into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Russia’s Kremlin-controlled parliament approved legislation that outlawed disparaging the military and the spread of “false information” about Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russian courts have used the legislation to hand out fines and prison terms to opposition critics, including those who describe Moscow’s full-invasion of Ukraine as a war, instead of using the Kremlin’s preferred euphemism of “special military operation”.
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Hello and welcome to our ongoing live coverage of the war in Ukraine.
Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov has arrived in Beijing, Moscow’s foreign ministry said on Monday, ahead of an expected visit by President Vladimir Putin.
The foreign ministry said on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, that Lavrov was in the Chinese capital as part of a Russian delegation.
Beijing is hosting representatives of 130 countries on Tuesday and Wednesday to mark a decade of its belt and road initiative (BRI) – a key geopolitical project of President Xi to extend China’s global reach.
But all eyes will be on Putin, who last month in St Petersbury told Beijing’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, he had “gladly accepted” President Xi Jinping’s invitation to visit China.
The Russian leader’s strategic dependence on China has grown since his invasion of neighbouring Ukraine thrust his country into international isolation.
Putin has hardly ventured beyond his country’s borders since the war, with this week’s trip the first to a major global power.
Meanwhile, leaders from the EU and the western Balkans will hold a summit in Albania’s capital on Monday to discuss the path to membership in the bloc for the six countries of the region.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has put integration of the western Balkans into the EU at the top of the 27-nation bloc’s agenda.
The main topics at the annual talks – called the Berlin Process – are integrating the western Balkans into a single market and supporting their green and digital transformation. The nations in the region are Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia.
The senior EU officials attending the summit in Tirana are the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Council president, Charles Michel. They will be joined by the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron.
Here are the other major developments:
A top Ukrainian commander has said Russia’s biggest offensive in months on the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka is failing, adding that Kyiv’s own attempts to advance in the south were proving “difficult”. Russia has continued to deploy new forces in an attempt to surround the city, according to Vitaliy Barabash, the head of its military administration. Both Moscow and Washington have described the surge in violence around Avdiivka as a new Russian offensive.
At least six people have been killed in Russian attacks on Ukraine in the past 24 hours, local officials reported on Sunday. Two people were killed and three more injured in the Kherson area after more than 100 shells bombarded the region over the weekend, the local governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, wrote on social media, according to AP.
The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sunday that a new weapons package for Israel and Ukraine would be significantly more than $2bn. In an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, Sullivan said Joe Biden would have extensive talks with the US Congress this week on the need for the package to be approved.
Russian forces had improved their positions along almost the entire line of contact in Ukraine, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said on Sunday. Reuters reported that in a video posted to social media by the Kremlin journalist Pavel Zarubin, Putin said: “What is happening now along the entire length of the [line of] contact is called an active defence.”
Volodymyr Zelenskiy thanked troops in areas where fighting was “particularly hot”. In his regular address, he said: “I thank everyone who is holding their positions and destroying Russian troops”, citing Avdiivka, Maryinka and other key locations in the Donetsk region.
Ukraine was working to evacuate nearly 260 of its citizens from Gaza and to fly other Ukrainians out of Israel, Zelenskiy said on Sunday. Ukraine’s embassy in Israel said on social media on Saturday that 207 Ukrainian citizens, including 63 children, were evacuated from Tel Aviv to Romania on Saturday and that another flight would take 155 people to Romania on Sunday.
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