live blog
US Secretary of Defense Austin has arrived in Kiev for an unannounced visit. The Ukrainian army reports numerous battles on the front in the east and south. The developments in the live blog.
Ukraine and Russia have again exchanged the remains of soldiers. The bodies of 94 Ukrainian soldiers were handed over to the Ukrainian side, the Kiev Coordination Staff for the Affairs of Prisoners of War announced on Telegram. The exchange came about through the mediation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. How many bodies the Russian side received and where the exchange took place was not reported.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will take part in a summit of the 20 leading industrialized and emerging countries (G20) for the first time on Wednesday after a long absence. At the virtual meeting, Putin will present Russia’s view of what he believes is a “deeply unstable world situation,” the government in Moscow said. Russian television reported that it was the first time in “a long time” that both Putin and Western leaders would attend an event together.
After the start of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, Western states insisted on Putin’s exclusion from top international meetings. The International Criminal Court (ICC) also issued an arrest warrant against Putin on suspicion of abducting Ukrainian children. The host of next year’s G20 summit, Brazilian President Lula da Silva, was evasive when asked whether he would execute the arrest warrant against Putin at the planned summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro if Putin arrived. Most recently, Putin was represented by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the G20 summit.
According to British experts, criticism of long deployments in Ukraine is growing among Russian soldiers and their families. This emerges from the daily intelligence report from the Ministry of Defense in London on the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. Accordingly, on November 7th, for the first time since the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022, women of Russian soldiers took to the streets in Moscow in protest and demanded that their men be rotated out of action at the front.
The demonstration was ended by the police within a few minutes, but the demand was remarkable, the British statement said. “The apparently unlimited combat deployment of personnel without rotation is increasingly viewed by the soldiers themselves and their families as unsustainable,” said the statement.
Russia has put out a wanted notice for Jamala, the Ukrainian winner of the Eurovision Song Contest ESC 2016. This was reported by Russian state news agencies. The Russian Interior Ministry in Moscow did not mention the criminal charges against the singer of Crimean Tatar origin. Jamala (40), whose real name is Sussana Jamaladinova, has repeatedly publicly denounced the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. She also advocates for the Crimean Tatars, who, according to human rights reports, are being oppressed on the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula. Jamala’s ESC winning song in Stockholm 2016 with the title “1944” was reminiscent of the expulsion of the Crimean Tatars from their homeland ordered by Moscow at the time.
The Ukrainian army says it has once again repelled dozens of Russian attacks along the almost 1,000 kilometer long front in the east and south. The situation report from the General Staff in Kiev from the morning recorded 46 Russian attacks on Sunday. They were all repulsed, it was said. The main focus was on the cities of Maryinka (16 Russian attacks) and Avdiivka (12 attacks) near the Russian-controlled Donbass capital Donetsk. This military information cannot immediately be independently verified.
Conflict parties as a source
In the current situation, information on the course of the war, shelling and casualties provided by official bodies of the Russian and Ukrainian parties to the conflict cannot be directly verified by an independent body.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has arrived in the Ukrainian capital Kiev for a visit. The minister traveled to Ukraine to meet with government officials and “reaffirm the United States’ resolute support for Ukraine’s struggle for freedom,” the Pentagon said. For security reasons, the visit was not announced.
“I am here to deliver an important message,” he writes on X. “The United States will continue to stand with Ukraine in its fight for freedom against Russian aggressors, today and in the future.”
According to its own statements, the Ukrainian army is establishing itself in the contested Kherson region southeast of the Dnipro River. “The defense forces continue to hold positions on the left bank of the Dnipro in the Kherson region,” the General Staff said on Facebook. The spokeswoman for the southern command post, Natalya Humenyuk, had previously said that the Ukrainian army had now pushed the Russians three to eight kilometers away from the river on the left bank, which was until recently completely occupied. International observers had also recently reported advances by the Ukrainians in the area.
Around 21 months after the start of the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fired the previous head of the medical department in his army. Major General Tetyana Ostashchenko’s position will be taken over by Anatoly Kasmirchuk in the future, Zelensky said in his evening video address, without giving specific reasons for this decision. But he emphasized that “a fundamentally new level of medical support for our military” is needed.
Ostashchenko was appointed commander of the Medical Forces Command of the Ukrainian Army in 2021. She was the first woman to hold this position. Recently, however, there has apparently been an increasing number of complaints from military doctors and paramedics about their work.
The Ukrainian military said it was able to push back Russian forces on the Russian-controlled eastern bank of the Dnipro River. Russia says it shot down a drone over Moscow. Sunday’s developments can be read in the live blog.