Ukraine Update…Day 933…Ukraine’s fight against Russia losing steam?

• US secretary of state Antony Blinken was briefed during his trip to Kyiv on elements of a Ukrainian plan to push Russia to end the war, US state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Tuesday. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy is expected to present the plan on the sidelines of the UN general assembly meeting in New York next week. Earlier on Tuesday, the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said Washington had seen the plan. “We think it lays out a strategy and a plan that can work,” she said.

• Russian forces captured the Ukrainian town of Ukrainsk in the eastern Donetsk region on Tuesday, Russian state-run RIA news agency and pro-Russian war bloggers reported, as they advanced westwards in a bid to take the whole of the Donbas. Russian troops raised their flag on a mine ventilation shaft on the outskirts of the town, which had a population of over 10,000 people before the war, RIA reported, citing an unidentified source in the Russian military. The General Staff of Ukraine’s military, in a late evening report, said nothing about Ukrainsk changing hands, referring to it as one of several localities under Russian attack. It said 34 assaults had been recorded near the town of Pokrovsk. Reuters was unable to immediately verify battlefield claims from either side due to reporting restrictions in the war zone.

• A false claim circulating on social media that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris left a 13-year-old girl paralysed after an alleged hit-and-run in San Francisco in 2011 is the work of a covert Russian disinformation operation, according to new research by Microsoft. Researchers found that the operation created a video, paid an actor to appear as the alleged victim, and spread the claim through a fake website for a non-existent San Francisco news outlet named “KBSF-TV”. The Russian group responsible, which Microsoft calls Storm-1516, is described as a Kremlin-aligned troll farm.

• Facebook owner Meta said on Monday it was banning RT, Rossiya Segodnya and other Russian state media networks from its platforms, claiming the outlets had used deceptive tactics to carry out covert influence operations online.
  The ban, strongly criticised by the Kremlin, marks a sharp escalation in measures by the world’s biggest social media company against Russian state media, after years of more limited steps such as blocking the outlets from running ads and reducing the reach of their posts.

• Russian forces heavily shelled an area of Ukraine’s south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region late on Tuesday, killing two people and injuring five, regional governor Ivan Fedorov said. Fedorov, writing on Telegram, said rescue teams were searching under rubble in the town of Komishuvakha, southeast of the regional centre of Zaporizhzhia.

• Ukrainian heavyweight boxing Olympic champion Oleksandr Usyk has been released after detention by law enforcement officers at Poland’s Krakow airport, Zelenskiy said on Wednesday. “I was outraged by this attitude towards our citizen and champion,” Zelenskiy said on the Telegram messaging app.
  “Our champion was released and no one is detaining him any more.” It was not immediately clear why the 37-year-old Usyk was detained. The WBC, WBO and WBA champion, who won gold at the 2012 London Olympics, has been a national hero aiding Kyiv’s war efforts. “Friends, everything is fine,” Usyk said in an Instagram post. “There was a misunderstanding that was quickly resolved. Thank you to everyone who was concerned.” Usyk’s charity fund, Usyk Foundation, aids Kyiv’s forces in the war that Russia launched with a full-scale invasion against Ukraine in 2022. It buys ambulances and delivers humanitarian aid to the front line….

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