Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 956

Here is the situation on Tuesday, October 8, 2024.

Fighting

At least one person was killed and six injured in Russian shelling in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk. Vadym Filashkin, the governor of the Donetsk region, said six multistorey apartment blocks were among the buildings damaged and that two children were among the injured.

One Ukrainian port worker was killed and five other people injured, including foreign nationals, after a Russian missile struck a Palau-flagged ship in Ukraine’s southern port of Odesa, in the second such attack in as many days. Ukrainian Minister for Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha condemned the attacks on the two ships. Ukraine’s Ministry for Restoration said the ship attacked on Sunday was the Saint Kitts and Nevis-flagged Paresa, which had a cargo of 6,000 tonnes of corn. Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed its forces captured the village of Hrodivka, close to the strategically important city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine said its forces struck an oil terminal on the Crimean Peninsula, which was seized and illegally annexed by Moscow in 2014. Russian-installed authorities in Crimea said there had been a fire at an oil depot in the Black Sea port town of Feodosia and there were no casualties.

The GRU, Ukraine’s military spy agency, said it “seriously damaged” the Alexander Obukhov, an Alexandrit-class Russian minesweeping vessel, in Russia’s Kaliningrad region in a sabotage operation. There was no immediate comment from Russia.

Ukraine said a Russian hypersonic missile struck the “area” of Ukraine’s major Starokostiantyniv airbase on Monday morning. The air force did not say whether the attack caused any damage. Local governor, Serhii Tyurin, said there were no civilian casualties or damage to critical infrastructure.

Two Russian Kinzhal missiles were also shot down in the Kyiv region, the Ukrainian air force said. Debris came down in three districts of the capital, but no major damage or casualties were reported. Ukrainian air defences shot down 32 Russian drones and a further 37 were lost on military radars, suggesting they had been disabled by electronic warfare systems, the air force said.

Politics and diplomacy

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the war had entered “a very important phase” and that Ukraine needed to “put pressure on Russia in the way that’s necessary for Russia to realise that the war will gain them nothing”. Speaking in a video statement, Zelenskyy added: “Only through strength can we bring peace closer”. The United States criticised Russia for withholding consular access for detained US citizen Stephen Hubbard after a court jailed the 72-year-old for six years and 10 months. Russia detained Hubbard in April 2022 and accused of being a “mercenary” for Ukraine. A court in Russia’s Kursk region ordered the arrest in absentia of two Italian journalists for reporting from the Ukrainian-occupied part of Kursk. The court demanded Simone Traini and Stefania Battistini, journalists from Italy’s RAI public broadcaster, be extradited for “illegally crossing” the border from Ukraine. A Ukrainian government source told the Reuters news agency that Ukrainian hackers were behind a large-scale cyberattack on Russian state media company VGTRK on Monday.