“In Kherson, the situation is clear. The Russians are gathering their forces.” Faced with this observation, coupled with the advance of Ukrainian troops who are determined to retake the city occupied since March, the adviser to the Ukrainian presidency, Oleksiy Arestovitch, estimated on Tuesday 25 October that no one was “ready to retreat”, and that “the fiercest of battles” was about to take place in Kherson.
Britain’s newest prime minister, Rishi Sunak, assured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday that his government would continue to be “unwavering support” for Ukraine. He also wanted to meet the Ukrainian head of state soon. For his part, Zelensky said he hoped “a strengthening” of his country’s relations with London, which is already one of his main supporters in the war against Russia.
While Russia has expressed concern about the possible use by Ukraine of a bomb containing radioactive substances, NATO sees in this attitude “a false pretext for an escalation of the war”. First wondering why Ukraine would use a “dirty bomb” to liberate territories”, the secretary general of the transatlantic organization, Jens Stoltenberg, then declared to know the Russian method, which would consist of “blaming others for this they intend to do themselves”.
On Tuesday, Russia repeated, before the UN Security Council, its accusations against Ukraine, and said it “doubts that the inspections of the International Atomic Energy Agency can prove that this is not the case”. The American president, for his part, warned that the use of a nuclear weapon by Russia would constitute an “enormously serious error”, thus responding to the words of the Kremlin, which declared itself ready to react to “possible provocations from the part of Ukraine”.
While Volodymyr Zelensky claimed on Monday that Russia had ordered “about 2,000 Iranian Shaheds”, Iranian President Isaac Herzog confirmed that Tehran was indeed supplying Moscow with explosive drones. He said he shared information collected by its intelligence services with the United States. “Iranian weapons play a key role in destabilizing our world and the international community must learn from this, now and in the future,” the president said.
On the occasion of an international conference devoted to the reconstruction of Ukraine, organized in Berlin, Volodymyr Zelensky asked Western leaders to “take a decision to plug the hole in the Ukrainian budget deficit” of 2023, estimating the sum necessary to “38 billion dollars”.
At the opening of the meeting, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had called for “starting now” this reconstruction, believing that it was “nothing less than creating a new Marshall Plan for the 21st century”. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the scale of the destruction in Ukraine “astounding”. “The World Bank estimates the cost of the damage at 350 billion euros. It is certainly more than what a country or a union can provide alone. We need everyone on deck”, he said. she says. This Berlin conference began just as German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier arrived in kyiv for his first visit to Ukraine, after the cancellation of a trip planned a week ago for security reasons.
On the ground, after more than eight months of conflict, fighting is raging in Bakhmout, a city in the Donetsk region that the Russian army has been trying to conquer for months. At least seven civilians were killed and three others injured on Monday, regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on Tuesday. “There were advances overnight but we cannot give details at the moment, the situation is complicated,” said a Ukrainian soldier engaged in the defense of the city. In Dnipropetrovsk, at least two people lost their lives after the city was bombarded Tuesday evening by the Russian army.
In southern Ukraine, pro-Russian authorities in the town of Melitopol announced that a car bomb had exploded near local media offices, injuring five people.
