Ukraine Update…Day 956…..Drone wars continue between Russia and Ukraine….

• Two women aged 72 and 56 were killed in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region when Russia “attacked a civilian car with a drone”, the governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said on Monday. There have been repeated reports of Russian drones deliberately targeting civilians in Kherson. Meanwhile Russian shelling on the port of Odesa left one dead and eight wounded, authorities said on Monday. Two civilian ships were damaged, including a Palau-flagged cargo vessel that was struck “for the second time” in two weeks, the Ukrainian deputy prime minister, Oleksiy Kuleba, said.

• Russia will probably be capable of launching an attack on Nato countries by 2030 and is ramping up sabotage efforts against Ukraine’s western supporters, German intelligence chiefs have warned their parliament. “Whether we like it or not, we are in a direct confrontation with Russia,” the BND foreign intelligence chief, Bruno Kahl, told a parliamentary hearing. The domestic intelligence chief, Thomas Haldenwang, listed suspected sabotage activities including a near miss involving a parcel bomb at Leipzig airport that went off before it was loaded on to a cargo plane. Germany spy chiefs said Russia had spied on critical infrastructure, arms activities and military shipments supporting Ukraine, and was looking to recruit people including from the world of organised crime.

• Kyiv’s forces were repelling Russian attempts to break through Ukraine’s lines in Russia’s western Kursk region for a fifth straight day, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday. Russia claimed it captured the village of Levadne in southern Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities, meanwhile, reported no night-time Shahed drone attacks for the first time in about six weeks, after saying five days ago that they blew up a Shahed storage facility in Russia’s Krasnodar region, destroying up to 400 drones.

• Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers is expanding despite efforts to curb Moscow’s wartime energy revenues, Pjotr Sauer writes. The volume of Russian oil being transported by poorly maintained and underinsured tankers has almost doubled in a year to 4.1m barrels a day by June, according to a report published on Monday by the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE). In December 2022, the UK alongside G7 countries, Australia, and the EU implemented a price cap of US$60 a barrel to restrict western companies from transporting, servicing or brokering Russian crude oil cargoes.

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday that Ukraine had already procured and supplied one million drones to the front. “And this is only from the state. There are also supplies from volunteers,” added the Ukrainian president. Zelenskyy said he had been briefed about North Korea’s involvement in the war and Russia’s plans for this autumn and winter. It came a day after he said North Korea had transferred personnel to the Russian armed forces. North Korea has supplied ballistic missiles and ammunition to Russia, which Moscow’s forces have used in their war in Ukraine, Kyiv and western allies say.

• The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, has visited the alliance’s Ukraine mission in Wiesbaden, Germany as it prepares to take over from the US in coordinating military aid for Ukraine. The move is widely seen as an effort to safeguard the aid mechanism Donald Trump if the Nato critic returns to the White House.

• The EU has imposed sanctions against prominent Iranian officials and entities, including airlines, accused of taking part in the transfer of missiles and drones for Russia to use against Ukraine. Entities sanctioned include Iran Air, Saha Airlines and Mahan Air, while individuals concerned include deputy defence minister Seyed Hamzeh Ghalandari and senior officials of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force. Also hit are procurement firms blamed for the transfer and supply of Iran-made UAVs, components and technologies to Russia; and companies involved in the production of propellant used to launch rockets and missiles. Britain, France, Germany and the US adopted similar sanctions last month.

• A Russian court on Monday sentenced a French researcher for a Swiss NGO to three years in a penal colony after finding him guilty of breaching a “foreign agent” law. Laurent Vinatier, 48, was arrested in Moscow in June. According to sources interviewed by AFP, the Frenchman had been working for years on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, before Russia launched its full-scale offensive in February 2022. Vinatier said he had lived in Russia for years. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, had demanded Vinatier’s release, saying the “propaganda” against him “does not match reality”. Paris has denounced the “extreme severity” of the sentence and called for Vinatier’s “immediate release”.

• Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Andriy Kostin, called on Brazil to arrest Vladimir Putin if the Russian president turns up there next month for the G20 summit. Putin is wanted by the international criminal court (ICC) on a warrant accusing him of the war crime of deporting children from Ukraine. “It’s an obligation for the Brazilian authorities as a state party of the Rome statute to arrest him if he dares to visit,” said Kostin, referring to the treaty that established the ICC….

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Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov arrived in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for an official visit on October 14, highlighting continued Russia-PRC defense cooperation against the backdrop of bilateral naval exercises in the Pacific Ocean.