Here is the situation on Tuesday, October 1, 2024.
Fighting
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, following a more than two-and-a-half-hour meeting with his top military commanders, said that the situation on the front line of the war was “very, very difficult”. Zelenksyy said Ukraine’s forces needed to act quickly and decisively in the coming weeks to achieve their objectives.
- Russia said its forces captured the village of Nelipivka on the eastern front line. It had a population of just under 1,000 people before the conflict began in 2022, according to official statistics. Ukraine’s General Staff made no acknowledgement of the village changing hands, but said that Russian forces had launched 10 attacks in and around it.
- Russia launched several waves of drones targeting Kyiv in the early hours of Monday. Ukraine’s military said the drones were either destroyed by defence systems or neutralised by electronic warfare during the five-hour attack. No casualties or damage were reported.
Politics and diplomacy
- Russia will increase defence spending by 25 percent to 13.5 trillion roubles ($145bn) in 2025. The move brings the defence budget to 6.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), the highest since the Cold War, according to draft budget documents.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin promoted 52-year-old former bodyguard Alexei Dyumin to the Security Council, along with a new generation of officials tasked with the functioning of wartime command centres and overseeing the defence industry.
- In a video message to mark two years since Russia’s claimed annexation of four Ukrainian regions, Putin insisted that Moscow would accomplish all the goals it had set for itself in Ukraine.
- Three journalists for independent Russian media outlets Republic and SOTAvision were arrested in Moscow outside a concert celebrating the annexations, rights group OVD-info said. The three had their phones confiscated and will be charged with “hooliganism”, the group added.
- Stephen James Hubbard, a 72-year-old US citizen, pleaded guilty in a Moscow court to charges of serving as a mercenary against Russia in the Ukraine war, Russia’s RIA news agency reported. Hubbard’s sister cast doubt on his reported confession, telling the Reuters news agency he was too old to fight.
- A Russian court jailed Alexander Permyakov for life over a 2023 car bombing in the Nizhny Novgorod region that seriously injured nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin and killed his driver. News reports said Permyakov was from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, once fought with the Russian-backed separatists there and was a vehement supporter of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
- Ukraine detained a 24-year-old woman and her 40-year-old neighbour in the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk on suspicion of being paid by Russia to set military vehicles on fire. Ukraine’s National Police later told the AFP news agency it had recorded “more than 200” similar crimes in several regions this year.
- Former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte is set to take over as NATO secretary-general on Tuesday. He will replace Jens Stoltenberg who has guided the Western alliance during a turbulent decade that included Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
