Closing summary
It’s 9pm in Kyiv. Here’s where we stand:
Russia no longer has full control of any of the four provinces of Ukraine it says it annexed last week. The Russian military has acknowledged that Kyiv’s forces had broken through in the Kherson region. It said the Ukrainian army and its “superior tank units” had managed to “penetrate the depths of our defence” around the villages of Zoltaya Balka and Alexsandrovka.
Ukraine has “fully cleared” Russian forces from the key eastern city of Lyman, its president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, confirmed, a day after Moscow admitted its troops had pulled out after they were encircled. Lyman’s recapture by Ukrainian troops is Russia’s largest battlefield loss since Ukraine’s lightning counteroffensive in the north-eastern Kharkiv region in September.
Russias’s ministry of defence spokesperson, Igor Konashenkov, said Russian troops had occupied what he called a “pre-prepared defensive line”. His comments are an admission that Ukraine’s southern counter-offensive is dramatically gaining pace, two months after it began. Ukrainian brigades appear to have achieved their biggest breakthrough in the region since the war started, bursting through the frontline and advancing rapidly along the Dnieper River.
President Zelenskiy said Ukraine is not just experiencing military success in Lyman, but also in Kherson. In his overnight statement, he said Ukraine forces have liberated the small Arkhanhelske and Myrolyubivka settlements in the Kherson region. Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Russian-imposed authority in the region, admitted that Ukrainians had gained some ground.
Ukraine’s military has said its forces recaptured the village of Torske near Lyman in the Donetsk region on Sunday. Russian forces who have been forced to retreat towards Luhansk’s city of Kreminna are being hit “with fire” by Ukrainian missile units, artillery and air forces, according to Serhii Cherevatyi, a spokesperson for the eastern group of Ukraine’s armed forces.
The Kremlin is still determining which areas of occupied Ukraine it has “annexed”, Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson has said. Putin has vowed to protect Russia’s newly claimed territories using “all means at its disposal”, indicating a potential nuclear strike. The lack of a clear red line may undermine his attempts at using nuclear deterrence to halt Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive and western support for Kyiv.
The lower house of Russia’s parliament, the state Duma, has approved laws on annexing four Ukrainian territories into Russia. No lawmakers in the lower house voted against the bill to incorporate the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk regions into Russia. Lawmakers in the upper house, Russia’s federation council, are expected to formalise the illegal annexation on Tuesday.
The Kremlin also said Russia favours a “balanced approach” to the issue of nuclear weapons that is not based on emotion. The remarks by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov come after Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-appointed leader of the Chechnya region, said Moscow should consider using a “low-yield” nuclear weapon in Ukraine.
The head of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine has been released, according to the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi. Ihor Murashov was detained on Friday by a Russian patrol as he travelled from the Zaporizhzhia plant to the town of Enerhodar, according to the state-owned company in charge of the plant.
Russia has sacked the commander of its western military district, Col Gen Alexander Zhuravlyov, according to news outlet RBC. The reported departure of Zhuravlyov, who led one of the five military districts that make up Russia’s armed forces, is the latest in a series of top officials to be fired after a series of defeats and humiliations in the war in Ukraine.
Thousands of people called up to fight in Ukraine from a far-eastern Russian region have been sent home due to wrongful mobilisation, according to a local official. In the Khabarovsk region, about 8,500km (5,300 miles) east of Moscow, the governor, Mikhail Degtyaryov, said an enlistment officer had been suspended for the wrongful mobilisation.
The Chechen leader and Vladimir Putin ally, Ramzan Kadyrov, has said that his three underage sons are heading to fight in Ukraine. Kadyrov said “the time has come” for his sons, 14, 15 and 16 years old, “to show themselves in a real battle” and that they will “soon go to the frontline”.
Russia has put Marina Ovsyannikova, the former state TV editor who interrupted a news broadcast to protest against the Ukraine war, on a wanted list after she reportedly escaped house arrest. The Ukrainian-born Ovsyannikova, 44, gained international attention in March after bursting into a studio of Channel One, her then employer, to denounce the Ukraine war during a live news bulletin, holding a poster reading “no war”.
The EU has summoned Russia’s top diplomat in Brussels in protest of President Vladimir Putin’s “illegal annexation” of four Ukrainian territories. The move is part of a coordinated exercise with EU member states, Peter Stano, a foreign affairs spokesperson for the bloc, said.
Ukraine is offering the US full visibility into its list of intended Russian targets in the hopes of receiving a new set of powerful, long-range rocket systems, according to Ukrainian officials. The move essentially gives the US veto power over Ukrainian targeting of Russia and is intended to convince the Biden administration that Ukraine would not use these new weapons to strike inside Russian territory.
A record 83% of Ukrainians would like their country to join the Nato military alliance, according to a new poll. Only 4% said they would vote against joining Nato and 9% said they would not vote.
That’s it from me, Léonie Chao-Fong, and the Russia-Ukraine war blog today. Thank you for following. I’ll be back tomorrow.
Updated
An independent Polish military analyst has raised alarms by identifying a train apparently moving through central Russia laden with trucks, as belonging to the 12th main directorate of the Russian armed forces, which is involved in the storage, transport, maintenance and issuance of nuclear weapons.
The claim comes at a time when Vladimir Putin and his top officials have been signalling that Russia will use all forces at its disposal to defend Russian territory, which the Kremlin, but almost no one else, now defines as including much of eastern Ukraine.
The analyst, Konrad Muzyka, said in a Twitter thread that the movement of the train does not necessarily mean preparations are being made for nuclear use. He said it could just be more signalling, or it could be training or regular wargaming.
This "another train with military equipment" is actually carrying kit belonging to the 12th Main Directorate of the Russian MoD. The directorate is responsible for nuclear munitions, their storage, maintenance, transport, and issuance to units. 1/ https://t.co/41QlVUpEGO
— Konrad Muzyka - Rochan Consulting (@konrad_muzyka) October 2, 2022
Does that mean that this video shows preparations for a nuclear release? Not really. There are other more likely explanations. 1) It could be a form of signalling to the West that Moscow is escalating 2) Russian RVSN forces usually train extensively during autumn 2/3
— Konrad Muzyka - Rochan Consulting (@konrad_muzyka) October 2, 2022
Muzyka does not make clear what it was about the train or the trucks that led him to identify them as coming from 12th main directorate, and has not yet replied to a query about it. Image analysts at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey studied the short film that Muzyka retweeted as his source, and could not find identifying details.
“Yes, the 12th main directorate has such trucks, but so does every other military unit,” Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear expert at the institute, said. “I can see nothing that would lead me to think those trucks are 12th directorate as opposed to something else.”
Updated
