Vladimir Putin said he believed the “partial mobilisation” of army reservists would be completed in two weeks. The Russian president said after attending a summit in Kazakhstan on Friday that a total of 222,000 reservists would be called up, down from the 300,000 figure initially circulated after the order last month.
The Belarus defence ministry said Russian troops would start arriving in the country “in the next few days” as part of its joint force.
The US and Germany are to deliver sophisticated anti-aircraft systems to Kyiv this month to counter attacks using Russian missiles and kamikaze drones, Ukraine’s defence minister said. Oleksiy Reznikov said Ukraine would receive the Iris-II air defence system from Germany this month.
A Russian submarine has reportedly been spotted off the French coast and escorted by the French navy. The submarine was spotted sailing on the surface off the Brittany coast at the end of September, the French navy said on its Twitter feed. It said British and Spanish warships had also been involved in monitoring the submarine’s movements.
Putin has called for the humanitarian corridors for Ukrainian grain to be closed if they are used for “acts of terror”. At a news conference in the Kazakh capital of Astana he also said there was “no need” for talks with the US president, Joe Biden.
A Ukrainian member of Kherson’s regional council has condemned Russia’s “evacuation” of the occupied city, saying it is in fact a “deportation”. The council member also said it was an evacuation for collaborators, urging residents to go to Ukrainian-controlled territory if they could.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has responded to criticism from the Ukrainian government calling for immediate access to all PoWs, saying: “We share the frustration regarding our lack of access to all prisoners of war.” Its comments came after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, accused the ICRC of inaction in upholding the rights of Ukrainian prisoners and called on it to visit the Olenivka camp in eastern Ukraine, where dozens of Ukrainian PoWs died in an explosion and fire in July.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX says it can no longer pay for critical satellite services in Ukraine, according to CNN. SpaceX is reportedly asking the US government to start paying instead.
The US will send munitions and military vehicles to Ukraine as part of a new $725m security assistance package, the defence department said on Friday. The package is the first since Russia’s barrage of missiles fired on civilian population centres in Ukraine this week, Reuters reports, and will bring total US security assistance since Russia’s invasion to $17.5bn.
Democrats on Capitol Hill have suggested transferring US weapons systems in Saudi Arabia to Ukraine and suspending a planned transfer of Patriot missiles to Riyadh in the wake of what they call a “turning point” in Washington’s relationship with the kingdom.
Saudi Arabia will provide $400m in humanitarian aid to Ukraine, Saudi state news agency SPA said. It added that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called Zelenskiy on Friday, Reuters reported.
A newly discovered hacking group has attacked transportation and logistics companies in Ukraine and Poland with a novel kind of ransomware, Microsoft said on Friday. The attackers targeted a wide range of systems within an hour on Tuesday, Microsoft said in a blog post, adding it had not been able to link the attacks to any known group yet. Notably, however, researchers found the hacks closely mirrored earlier attacks by a Russian government-linked cyber team.
Oleh Synyehubov, the governor of Kharkiv, said two 16-year-old boys were among those injured by Russian shelling in the region in the last 24 hours.
The UK Ministry of Defence said that “Russia continues to prosecute offensive operations in central Donbas and is, very slowly, making progress”. The ministry said that “in the last three days, pro-Russian forces have made tactical advances towards the centre of the town of Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast” and “likely advanced into the villages of Opytine and Ivangrad to the south of the town”.
