Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 959

Here is the situation on Friday, October 11, 2024.

Fighting

• Eight people were killed and nine were hurt in a Russian ballistic missile attack on port infrastructure in the southern Odesa region of Ukraine, according to Regional Governor Oleh Kiper. Wednesday’s attack hit a Panama-flagged container vessel that was at the port.
• Oleksii Kuleba, the deputy prime minister of Ukraine, claimed that Russia has launched additional strikes against Ukraine’s port infrastructure in the coming months.
• At least six people were injured after a series of Russian-guided bomb attacks on the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, regional governor, Ivan Fedorov, said. The attack also damaged 29 buildings.
• A Russian drone attack on the central city of Kryvyi Rih injured two people and damaged a five-storey residential building, causing a fire, Dnipropetrovsk regional governor, Serhiy Lysak, said.
• According to the military of Kyiv, out-manned Ukrainian forces were able to repel Russian assaults inside the important city of Toretsk. Street fighting was raging in the hilltop town, according to a Reuters news agency spokesman Anastasia Bobovnikova, who claimed Russian troops were “completely erasing” buildings as they advanced and “completely destroyed” them.
• Russian missiles struck two launchers of a US-made Patriot air defense system in central Ukraine, according to Kyiv, who acknowledged the attack but maintained that it was still operational. According to a blogger for the Ukrainian military, the strike occurred in the Dnipropetrovsk region of Pavlohrad.
• The Ukrainian military said it struck an ammunition depot at an airfield in Russia’s Adygeya region in the North Caucasus, about 450km (280 miles) from the front line in eastern Ukraine. No one was hurt when the drone attack started a fire in Rodnikovyi, according to Adygeya regional head Murat Kumpilov, who reported that no one was hurt.

Politics and diplomacy

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, gave his supporters a lightning tour of Western European cities as he revealed his “victory plan.” He also met Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in London, as well as NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris. Before departing to Germany for talks with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he is scheduled to meet Pope Francis on Friday morning.
• Zelenskyy refuted media reports that he was discussing a ceasefire with Russia while speaking in Paris. “This is not the topic of our discussions”, he told reporters. “It’s not right”.
• In Rome, Meloni announced Italy would host the next “recovery conference” to help Ukraine’s reconstruction. From July 10 to July 11, 2019, Meloni stated that the conference would take place in Rome.
• A representative from Ukraine’s prison of war coordination headquarters announced that Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, who vanished in August 2023 while reporting from occupied east Ukraine, had passed away. He continued, investigations were being conducted into the circumstances surrounding her death.
• Ukraine’s parliament approved the first major tax hike since Russia’s full-scale invasion as military spending soars. The law also mandates a 50% effective tax rate on bank profits, a 25% tax on financial companies, and a 1.5 to 5 percent increase in the war tax paid by citizens.
• Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, refrained from saying that North Korean soldiers in Ukraine were likely to be fighting alongside Russian troops, according to the defense minister of South Korea.
• Unilever, a global manufacturer of household goods and cosmetics, sold its Russian operations to Russian company Arnest Group after selling its Russian operations. The amount Arnest paid was not made public. According to Unilever, the deal also included its business in Belarus.

Weapons

• According to an investigation conducted by The Associated Press news agency, Russia has hired about 200 young African women to work at a Tatarstan factory that produces Iranian-designed drones for use in Ukraine. The women were lured to Russia by a social media campaign that offered free flights and work-study opportunities in industries like hospitality and catering before finding themselves at a drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which is located 600 kilometers (600 miles) east of Moscow.
• If Donald Trump wins the US presidential election on November 5, the Kiel Institute warned that Western military and financial aid to Kyiv could shrink to about 29 billion euros ($31.64 billion) in 2025. Trump has claimed he would end the war “in 24 hours” if elected. He has not specified how.