This Week, We Secured Support From Our Partners in Terms of the Victory Plan – Address by the President

20 October 2024 – 20:50

I wish you health, fellow Ukrainians!

Briefly about this day.

First, I want to acknowledge all our defenders of the skies who shoot down “Shahed” drones every night. This year – nearly every night, and sometimes in the mornings and during the day – we face the threat of “Shahed” drones. The strike drones given to Russia by Iran. They’ve become one of the main tools of Russian terror against Ukraine. And, unfortunately, the Russians and Iranians continue to improve them. We have always told our partners that it is necessary to be more decisive in countering such criminal alliances. Just this week, from Monday until today, there have been “Shaheds” every day. On October 18th alone, there were 129 of these drones. And since the beginning of the year, Russia has already used over 6,130 “Shaheds.” Our warriors manage to shoot down a significant portion of them. Electronic warfare systems help a lot, but not with everything. That’s why there needs to be more pressure on Russia’s ability to already produce these weapons. We need the capability to destroy not only the storage bases for the “Shaheds” but also the entire infrastructure for their production and logistics. Unfortunately, terrorists know how to take advantage of the time that the free world’s indecision gives them.

Similarly, there is now a new threat – the criminal alliance between Russia and North Korea. I am grateful to the leaders and representatives of nations who are not turning a blind eye and are speaking openly about this cooperation aimed at increasing the scale of the war. About the weapons being supplied from North Korea to Russia. About what Russia might give Pyongyang in return for this assistance. Unfortunately, the instability and threats could grow significantly once North Korea starts learning the peculiarities of modern warfare. Now we have clear evidence that people are being supplied to Russia from North Korea, and these are not just workers for industries, but also military personnel. And we expect a normal, honest, strong reaction from our partners to this. In fact, this is another state joining the war against Ukraine. Everyone has the opportunity to see the evidence – both through satellites and through the video that is already coming from Russia. This must be addressed. There must be a response. We must counter this. We cannot let evil grow. If the world remains silent now, and if we end up facing North Korean soldiers on the front lines as regularly as we are defending against “Shaheds,” it will benefit no one in the world and will only prolong this war. A war that must be ended justly and as soon as possible.

And one more thing.

This week, we secured support from our partners in terms of the Victory Plan – thank you to France, Lithuania, our Nordic partners, and many other allies in the European Union. We’ve also received very positive signals from the United States – we are hearing changes in rhetoric. We are expecting a visit from a team from Washington, so that we can work on the points of the Victory Plan at all operational levels. We’ve agreed on several new support packages, both for defense and energy. This is not easy for us to achieve, but there is no other way to defeat the enemy. I am grateful to everyone who is helping. We must continue working together, in unity, to achieve results for all of us – for all of Ukraine. However, while this is happening, unfortunately, there are things going on here, in the rear of Ukraine, that make external enemies seem unnecessary. This is truly an internal enemy. What’s happening with the Medical and Social Expert Commissions and the audacity of certain individuals – particularly prosecutors – who used their connections with the MSECs to obtain fake disability statuses. I expect swift and decisive action from law enforcement, especially from the Security Service of Ukraine, the State Bureau of Investigation, and the Prosecutor General’s Office. I have scheduled a meeting of the National Security and Defense Council.

Glory to Ukraine!

Kupiansk:

Ukrainian warriors repulsed another massive attack in the Kupiansk direction. They destroyed 8 russian IFVs and 3 tanks. Six more IFVs were damaged.

📹: 92nd Assault Brigade pic.twitter.com/NAhtYTAVWT

— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) October 20, 2024

The Kurakhove front:

Some very concerning advances by Russian forces in key frontline areas. Fighting in the Kurakhove sector is especially tough and a worrisome pocket formed there. Chasiv Yar gains after months of static have brought Russian troops just 8km from Kostyantynivka, down the main T-0504… https://t.co/nSFvbZVgLf pic.twitter.com/vV4jQgpBx6

— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) October 20, 2024

Here’s the full text of Miller’s tweet:

Some very concerning advances by Russian forces in key frontline areas. Fighting in the Kurakhove sector is especially tough and a worrisome pocket formed there. Chasiv Yar gains after months of static have brought Russian troops just 8km from Kostyantynivka, down the main T-0504 hwy.

The Kursk cross border offensive:

Russian T-90M was also destroyed during todays attack on the positions of 46th Brigade. https://t.co/2ovDODGJgJ pic.twitter.com/4StJEyZrHn

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) October 20, 2024

On the other hand deepstate and HUR have claimed that Russia was pushed back from the village completely.

With the recent track record of all actors involved I do not have a coherent idea if the Russians are still in these positions or not.https://t.co/KZ2WIJrFKr

— John Helin (@J_JHelin) October 19, 2024

DeepState confirms. The bridgehead is cut in two. pic.twitter.com/4rd6F2hSkX

— John Helin (@J_JHelin) October 20, 2024

Russian Orion UAV was shot down today by Ukrainian Strela-10 air defence system. By the 80th Brigade of Ukraine. Kursk region. https://t.co/2nhsxsqkBQ pic.twitter.com/iIWOoAgiIt

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) October 20, 2024

Kharkiv Oblast:

There’s a silence heavier than the rubble in this photo. A russian air bomb struck this home in Kharkiv Oblast, reducing it to the final resting place of an elderly couple. This tragedy could have been prevented – if only the skies over Ukraine had been properly defended. pic.twitter.com/cVPSA88Mpg

— Iryna Voichuk (@IrynaVoichuk) October 20, 2024

This often goes unnoticed, but imagine finding yourself near the frontline in your 70s when you can’t just go and build yourself a new life elsewhere.
Instead of enjoying their golden years in their home, these people had to choose between fleeing into poverty and homelessness… https://t.co/lvdaTL6JRx

— Kate from Kharkiv (@BohuslavskaKate) October 20, 2024

Here’s the full text of the tweet above:

This often goes unnoticed, but imagine finding yourself near the frontline in your 70s when you can’t just go and build yourself a new life elsewhere.
Instead of enjoying their golden years in their home, these people had to choose between fleeing into poverty and homelessness or staying to protect what remained of their lives.
They chose to stay, and russia murdered them

And the full text of the quoted tweet:

The bodies of a 71-year-old man and 72-year-old woman were discovered beneath the rubble of a damaged residential building in Novoplatonivka, Kharkiv region, the Kharkiv Regional Military Administration reported. Russian forces struck the village with an aerial bomb around 3:15 PM today.

Russia kills people i the Kharkiv region every single day.

4 russian aerial bombs just struck multiple parts of Kharkiv. One of the blasts was close to my apartment, I felt the building shake, and the windows rattle a little.
Russia is a terrorist state.

— Kate from Kharkiv (@BohuslavskaKate) October 20, 2024

Zaporizhzhia Oblast:

The moment of the russian glide bomb attack on Zaporizhzhia yesterday. They injured 10 people, including two children. pic.twitter.com/jt17prCq8V

— Kate from Kharkiv (@BohuslavskaKate) October 20, 2024

The Russians have put a Kab missile into the centre of Zaporizhzhia.

This was next to a shopping mall filled with newly stocked Christmas decorations. This is who the Russians are trying to murder.

Civilians buying Christmas decorations. This is terrorism on a daily scale. pic.twitter.com/JsuMHOTvGs

— Caolan (@CaolanRob) October 20, 2024

today’s Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. a saturday evening, families in the middle of their weekend shopping, driving one of the busiest highways. then russians drop several glide bombs on them.

russia is a death cult 😩 pic.twitter.com/bfkGAwQcAl

— вареничок.eristavi 🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@maksymeristavi) October 19, 2024

Russians just tried to massacre a shopping center full of families on a busy Saturday evening by sending two 500kg guided bombs but both missed, only blowing up neighboring buildings and a parking lot.

Is there anything as disgusting as Russia?
pic.twitter.com/u7xcwD5xq5

— Jay in Kyiv (@JayinKyiv) October 19, 2024

Kryvyi Rih:

Overnight in #Ukraine, Russia struck the city of Kryvyi Rih: In order to kill & injure more people, they carried out a war crimes double tap attack. 17 people injured, including a rescuer. Fire service vehicles damaged, along with several buildings, including residential damaged… pic.twitter.com/g26J6zgusn

— Glasnost Gone (@GlasnostGone) October 20, 2024

Odesa:

❗️A huge column of smoke rises above Odesa after Russian missile strike on the city.

Russians again attacked port infrastructure. Local media report a major fire. pic.twitter.com/6LUyoTB2Eq

— KyivPost (@KyivPost) October 20, 2024

Tblisi, Georgia:

TBILISI NOW: Hear us roar, Georgia is Europe 🇬🇪🇪🇺 pic.twitter.com/iI4kSOVSfV

— Katie Shoshiashvili (@KShoshiashvili) October 20, 2024

You won’t see as many EU flags in any other EU country as you do in Georgia. Nowhere across the EU will you find so many people fighting on a daily basis for and defending democratic values like the Georgians.

Here Georgians show how exactly they are gonna vote in six days. pic.twitter.com/r5QRV6uwbA

— Eto Buziashvili (@EtoBuziashvili) October 20, 2024

Europe, can you hear our voice? 🇬🇪🇪🇺

Happening now on Rustaveli avenue! #Tbilisi #Georgia #Georgiaelections

📸 Ezz Gaber pic.twitter.com/yajvEU4l8Q

— Mariam Kasrashvili 🇬🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺 (@KasrashviliM) October 20, 2024

Moldova:

🇲🇩I’m working in Moldova as an international observer from PACE.

The presidential elections are taking place here, along with the referendum vote on the country’s accession to the EU.

A truly historic day for Moldova! pic.twitter.com/43qfp1RwNN

— Oleksiy Goncharenko (@GoncharenkoUa) October 20, 2024

God to see @BBCNews giving prominent coverage to this – article by the always-excellent @sarahrainsford. Very unusual for the UK news to pay attention to Moldova. https://t.co/zejBc1p4HM

— Ruth Deyermond (@ruth_deyermond) October 19, 2024

From the BBC:

The sniffer dogs at Chisinau Airport have been working extra hard in recent months, searching for money that might be evidence of Russian meddling in Moldovan politics.

Ami, a black retriever, gives every suitcase that rolls in on the baggage claim belts a good sniff on all sides. If she detects cash, she will freeze. Back in May she was doing that a lot.

That is when customs officers began finding large amounts of money on passengers arriving via connecting flights from Moscow. People who had never left Moldova before were returning from a few days in Russia with wads of notes.

“Almost everyone had money: 2,000, 3,000, 7,000 euros”, the head of customs at Chisinau Airport, Ruslan Alexandrov, remembers. The amounts themselves were not illegal but the patterns were suspicious.

“There were certain flights: Moscow-Istanbul-Chisinau, Moscow-Yerevan-Chisinau,” the customs chief explains. “Normally people don’t come in with that much money. Not from Moscow.”

So police and prosecutors began seizing the cash. In one day alone they say they scooped $1.5m (£1.2m). No-one ever asked for their money back.

The authorities believe the cash mules were part of a major and ongoing operation to buy political influence run by a fugitive Moldovan oligarch named Ilan Shor. Convicted of major fraud in Chisinau, he is now resident in Russia which will not extradite him.

Ahead of two key votes this weekend, the capital’s airport is on alert. Flights from all “high risk” routes are met by sniffer dogs and at least half the passengers are pulled over for extra baggage scans.

On Sunday, President Maia Sandu is running for re-election on a staunchly pro-EU platform, challenged by 10 other candidates. Many are openly sympathetic to Moscow; some see Moldova as a “bridge”.

Voters will also get to cast their ballot in a referendum on whether to enshrine Moldova’s goal of EU accession in the constitution. In fact, membership talks have already begun but the country has been in a battle over its political direction for decades, ever since Moldova gained independence from Moscow as the Soviet Union fell apart.

That East-West tug has intensified since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. President Sandu – a former World Bank economist first elected on a promise to clean up corruption – then steered Moldova much more sharply towards the West. She began to openly identify Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a major security threat.

The Kremlin denies playing any role in Chisinau politics, but officials here accuse Russia of operating via proxies to disrupt and destabilise the country.

“I’m not aware of anywhere else where we’ve seen such a brazen and open attempt to corrupt an election,” Moldova’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, Veronica Dragalin, told me this week in her office in Chisinau.

Born in Moldova, she spent most of her life in the US – most recently as a prosecutor in Los Angeles – before returning to the country and a job in a small office on the fifth floor of a Soviet-era block with a broken lift.

What her team say they have uncovered, working with police, is a pyramid payments scheme openly run from Russia by Ilan Shor and his group.

“We’re talking about a foreign country sending money in an attempt to influence the election,” Ms Dragalin spells it out. She details evidence gained through wiretaps, police infiltrators and witnesses – some of which her office has made public.

“At the start they tried to make it look legitimate. Now it’s almost like they’re flagrantly flaunting all the laws… [and] openly influencing the decision to vote,” the prosecutor says.

“The primary goal is to have the referendum fail.”

According to her team, once the cash couriers were detected at the airport and that route made more difficult, payments began to be channelled via a sanctioned Russian bank, PSB.

By early October as many as 130,000 voters had received payment through this scheme – about 10% of the active electorate, according to Viorel Cernauteanu, the chief of police.

“In September alone, $15m (£12m) was transferred,” he told me, explaining how they could trace funds and recipients because they gave personal data to open a bank account.

Offering money or goods in return for votes is a crime with a possible five-year jail sentence. Last month, a new law made it an administrative offence to accept money, too.

But in one of Europe’s poorest countries it is not hard to find willing recipients of cash.

Much more at the link!

Ultra high net worth individual (oligarch) in a series of legal disputes, both criminal and civil, suddenly pumps obscene amounts of cash into a national election in a very public manner. Seems somewhat familiar, but I can’t quite place it. I’m sure it’ll come to me later.

Moldova cleared a key hurdle as part of its bid to join the EU in a set of votes on Sunday that may help break the Kremlin’s decades-long grip on the country. https://t.co/X1qfPZykIX

— Patrick Donahue (@patrickjdo) October 20, 2024

Bloomberg has the details:

Moldovans were on track to clear a key hurdle toward joining the European Union in a set of votes on Sunday that may help break the Kremlin’s decades-long grip on the country.

More than 32% of voters participated in a referendum to join the EU as of 3 p.m. local time on Sunday, just shy of a one-third threshold required to validate the ballot, the country’s Central Electoral Commission said. The nation is also holding a presidential election, in which Maia Sandu is favored to win a second term.

The stakes are high in the former Soviet republic as the pro-EU government faced what it called an unprecedented effort to thwart vote in a coordinated campaign. Polls show a majority of Moldovans favor EU accession as well as a new term for Sandu as she seeks to steer the country into the EU by the end of the decade.

“I voted today for Moldovans to be able to decide their own fate, not anyone else,” Sandu said as she cast a ballot in the capital Chisinau. “Not based on the lies and the dirty money, but only the will of the people,” she added.

One of Europe’s poorest nations, Moldova began EU accession talks this year after securing candidacy status alongside Ukraine in 2022. Sandu’s government has pledged to overhaul the nation’s justice system and bolster the economy to become a member by 2030.

But Russia, which has dominated Moldova’s energy resources and political system since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has sought to block the country’s Western path. With the US and EU accusing Moscow of meddling in the elections, the chief Moldovan negotiator with the EU this week said Moscow had pumped some €100 million ($109 million) into an effort to disrupt the votes.Police in the country reported 75 incidents of disruption as of 3:30pm, including efforts to transport or bribe voters, photographing ballots, intimidation and scuffling.

The Kremlin “categorically rejects” allegations that it’s interfering in Moldova’s electoral process, spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday, according to the state-run Tass news service.

Success for the referendum, which would anchor Moldova’s bid in the nation’s constitution, would be a boon to Sandu, a 52-year-old former World Bank official who has led Moldova since 2020 with an agenda to extricate the country from Moscow’s orbit and integrate it into the West.

A procession of EU leaders has visited Chisinau in recent weeks, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz in August and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week. Sandu may face one of her pro-Kremlin opponents in a second round of voting on Nov. 3 if no candidate on Sunday receives more than 50% of the vote.

More at the link.

Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Russia:

An explosion in the direction of RU explosives plant (https://t.co/7TktHm5cvs) in Dzerzhinsk, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, RU (morning 20 OCT 2024).

POV ~ 56.23266, 43.38089
Azimuth ~ 339.6° (very approx.)@GeoConfirmed
Src: https://t.co/rm8Da06FOGhttps://t.co/kle5onD9Jk pic.twitter.com/6bvpZH5fSZ

— D. mojavensis 🇺🇲 🇺🇦 (@Dmojavensis) October 20, 2024

That’s enough for tonight.

Your daily Patron!

There are no new Patron tweets or videos today. Here is some adjacent material.

SOF UA Party pic.twitter.com/Nz6pgs6D5b

— UkrARMY cats & dogs (@UAarmy_animals) October 20, 2024

This cat have now family. pic.twitter.com/onNNwNtAhm

— UkrARMY cats & dogs (@UAarmy_animals) October 20, 2024

Open thread!