The Ukraine Daily Briefing · Sunday, November 1, 2026
Prepared by Diana Bozhyk
Ukraine said it took back more territory in October than Russia captured and inflicted a record 54,400 casualties, the most in any month of the full-scale war. Overnight, Russia sent 433 drones under heavy cloud, and one killed a 13-year-old girl at a dormitory for displaced families in the Vinnytsia region. The Oleshky ceasefire ended at 11 p.m. after 167 more civilians were evacuated from the Kherson region’s right bank, and late at night hackers took over Ukraine’s air-raid app to warn of a nuclear strike.
First responders at the scene of a Russian strike on the territory of a vocational school dormitory. (State Emergency Service/ Telegram)
The Day’s Reckoning
On the first day of November, Zelensky added up October. “In October, our Defense Forces of Ukraine inflicted record losses on the enemy and regained more territory than the Russian occupiers were able to capture,” he wrote. Ukraine’s General Staff counted 54,400 Russian troops killed, wounded or missing, the highest monthly figure of the war.
That is the plot of this Sunday: a war that, by the numbers, is turning, and a night that showed how far it still has to go. Russia launched 433 drones while clouds hid them from Ukraine’s gunners. In the Vinnytsia region, one hit between a school and a dormitory where displaced families live, killing a 13-year-old girl and wounding three 5-year-olds.
And then, late at night, phones across Ukraine lit up with a message in Russian: “A nuclear alert is about to go off all across Ukraine! Don’t worry, the Oreshnik is on its way.” It was a hack. The Air Force told people to stay calm.
A car burns in the aftermath of a Russian strike on the territory of a vocational school dormitory. (State Emergency Service/Telegram)
The Month Russia Lost Ground
You are a drone operator in Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces. In October, your branch hit a Russian target every 41 seconds.
Zelensky said Ukraine liberated 96.2 square kilometers in October, 10.4 more than the 85.8 Russia captured. The Institute for the Study of War, using its own geolocated evidence, came to a similar conclusion by different figures: Russia seized 139.85 square kilometers and lost 167.14, a net loss of 27.29, or nearly a kilometer a day. It was the second month in a row Russia lost ground. Russian forces gained only in the Sumy and Zaporizhzhia regions.
The cost to Russia was the highest of the war: 54,400 killed, wounded or missing, 8,170 more than in September and the fourth straight month above 40,000. “This is a record for any month of the full-scale war,” Zelensky said. “Russia is losing.” The General Staff said the rate “exceeds the enemy’s ability to replenish its units.” Drone forces commander Robert “Magyar” Brovdi said his units alone accounted for 16,796 of the casualties, flying 255,605 missions and hitting 64,807 targets, with a peak of 701 Russian casualties on October 24. His branch makes up about 2.5 percent of Ukraine’s forces but accounts for roughly a third of Russian casualties; Russia has put a $20 million bounty on him and sentenced him to life in absentia. His forces also led Operation Molochka, which struck 300 shadow-fleet tankers in the Black and Azov seas from July 6. Nearly 70 percent came on the Dobropillia-Pokrovsk, Oleksandrivka and Hulyaipole axes. The National Guard’s 1st Azov Corps said it had killed, wounded or captured more than 6,800 Russian troops in the Dobropillia direction. Russia announced plans on October 2 to conscript another 120,000 people; in August, Zelensky warned that Moscow planned to mobilize about 300,000 after its September election.
ISW assessed that Russia has lost the initiative across much of the front. It keeps it only around Dobropillia, where it has massed troops for marginal gains that, the think tank said, would not open the way to wider advances in the Donetsk region. Ukraine holds the initiative near Kupyansk, Lyman and Oleksandrivka, and contests it in western Zaporizhzhia. More than a year after first infiltrating Kostiantynivka, Russian forces hold about 36 percent of the city, though Putin falsely claimed its capture in July. North of Kharkiv, Ukrainian forces have largely stabilized the line, and near Kupyansk and Borova Russia has largely given up attacking after Operations Vivaldi and Veles.
On Sunday itself, Russian attacks across the front gained no ground. Ukrainian forces counterattacked northeast and south of Lyman and northeast of Dobropillia, and Russian military bloggers acknowledged Ukrainian advances near Zelenyi Hai, northeast of Borova. Ukrainian drones struck Russian infiltrators at Kupyansk-Vuzlovyi, north of Rusyn Yar and at Verkhnya Tersa, west of Hulyaipole. The Kherson front was quiet under the truce. Ukraine’s General Staff has put Russia’s total losses since 2022 at 1,590,270; Washington’s CSIS estimated in January that Ukraine had suffered 500,000 to 600,000 casualties through December 2025, putting the ratio of Russian to Ukrainian losses at roughly 2.5 or 2 to 1.
Where the Fighting Is
You are a Ukrainian soldier near Dobropillia. The Russians attack here about 30 times a day, more than anywhere else on the front.
ISW said Russia has thrown most of its 41st Combined Arms Army and about a third of its elite Rubikon drone units at Dobropillia, its highest-intensity sector since at least August, instead of turning toward Druzhkivka, where it might gain more. The result has been small-group infiltrations but no consolidated positions in the town, nowhere near Putin’s latest deadline of taking the Fortress Belt by spring 2027. Russia has also moved elements of its 1st Guards Tank Army from Kupyansk to Lyman after Ukrainian counterattacks battered two of its armies there, yet still averaged 7.4 attacks a day toward Lyman in October.
East of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the pressure has eased sharply. Russian attacks toward Sloviansk fell to about three a day in October, and toward Kramatorsk to fewer than one, as Ukrainian troops counterattacked along the Siverskyi Donets and near Rai-Oleksandrivka, Vasyutynske, Tykhonivka and Malynivka. In Kostiantynivka, Russian troops have infiltrated about three-quarters of the city but control only about a third, and Ukrainian forces have counterattacked south and southwest of Druzhkivka since late September. In the south, Russia has sent the 76th Airborne Division to the Hulyaipole direction and keeps reinforcing its armies there, with tactically significant gains near Orikhiv but nothing larger. In the north, ISW said Russia’s Northern Group of Forces invented an encirclement northeast of Kharkiv, likely to mislead the Kremlin.
Flame engulfs the city administration building partially destroyed by a Russian airstrike in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. (Alex Nikitenko/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)
Counting Russian infiltrations, ISW said Russia lost a net 76 square kilometers in October. It seized 10 small settlements, and Ukraine liberated or cleared 11. ISW said heavy losses and recruitment that cannot replace them likely explain Putin’s turn to a new theory of victory: using ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones to try to hammer Ukraine into surrender over the winter.
433 Drones Under the Clouds
You live in a dormitory for displaced families in the Kozyatyn district of the Vinnytsia region. Your family fled the war once already. On Sunday, the war finds you again.
A Russian drone struck the grounds between the dormitory and a vocational school building. Two people were killed, among them a 13-year-old girl. Six were wounded: three 5-year-old children, a 16-year-old boy and a 24-year-old man. One of the 5-year-olds is in serious condition, Governor Natalia Zabolotna said. Two cars burned. Photos showed medics tending to a victim on a playground.
Overnight, Russia launched 433 drones, but only 64 jet-powered ones. Presidential adviser Serhiy “Flash” Beskrestnov said Russia used dense cloud cover to send slower Shahed-type drones, which are harder for gunners to see. Ukraine downed 371, about 86 percent of the conventional drones and 73 percent of the jet-powered ones despite the weather; drones struck 16 locations, and debris fell at 14. They hit energy facilities in the Dnipropetrovsk, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr and Khmelnytskyi regions, wounding three DTEK workers, and DTEK imposed emergency outages in Kyiv. The Energy Ministry reported outages in nine regions, from Zhytomyr and Kyiv to Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv. “As things stand, hundreds of thousands of families remain without electricity,” Zelensky said. In the Rivne region, a strike set a 100-square-meter fire in a house in the Ostroh district, injuring four.
Across the past day, Russian attacks killed one person and wounded at least 47. In the Dnipropetrovsk region, 17 were hurt, including three children. In Sloviansk, one person was killed, and eight were wounded across the Donetsk region. In the Sumy region, 12 were wounded, and the air-raid alert lasted 23 hours and 57 minutes. In the Kharkiv region, seven were hurt, including a 16-year-old girl; a 14-year-old was injured in the Poltava region.
Zelensky counted the week: 1,940 attack drones, more than 1,580 guided bombs and 44 missiles, 36 of them ballistic. “The intensity of the strikes is very high, and the Russians are trying to take maximum advantage of our deficit of ballistic interceptors,” he said. “This month there were new decisions from the U.S. and European countries regarding new packages for Ukraine. But these deliveries cannot wait for years.” In Istanbul on Saturday, he said Ukraine would ask European partners to lend it 10 to 30 Patriot missiles each from their stocks, to be repaid from the 500-missile American order.
Strikes That Cost Russia $70 Million
Ukraine’s long-range campaign went on. The Ukrainian Strategic Communications Center said Ukrainian forces hit Lukoil’s NORSI refinery in Kstovo, Nizhny Novgorod region, about 800 kilometers from the border; footage showed a large fire. It is Russia’s fourth-largest refinery and second-largest gasoline producer, processing 15 to 17 million tons of crude a year and making diesel and jet fuel for the military. Ukraine has struck it 10 times since the start of 2025, most recently on August 26, forcing it to stop work, and local officials acknowledged a strike on an industrial site in the Kstovo district.
Zelensky said Saturday’s strike on the Kamensky plant in the Rostov region, which makes rocket fuel, also hit a Pantsir-S2 air-defense system and a command vehicle of an S-400 system, together worth about $70 million. “We are rightfully defending ourselves against Russian aggression and doing everything we can to limit Russia’s ability to continue it,” he said. The Defense Ministry confirmed that Thursday’s strike on Marinovka destroyed two Su-34 bombers worth about $100 million, and that an Iskander-M launcher was destroyed in the Kursk region.
The Truce Ends
The Oleshky ceasefire expired at 11 p.m. Kyiv time. Before it did, Ukraine used it for one more rescue. The General Staff said units of the Southern Group of Forces, working with local authorities, evacuated 167 civilians from shelled areas on the Ukrainian-held right bank of the Kherson region, among them 22 children and 21 people with limited mobility, driving through mined roads past wrecked military and civilian vehicles while, the General Staff said, “strictly” observing the ceasefire. They were people who until then had had no chance to leave the most dangerous areas. “Each person saved is the result of joint work and coordinated interaction of all those involved in the humanitarian mission,” it said.
Members of Ukraine’s”South” Task Force help evacuate civilians around the Kherson Oblast amid the Oleshky humanitarian ceasefire. (“South” Task Force / Ukraine General Staff/ Telegram)
Melania Trump, who mediated the truce, shared video of the Oleshky evacuees arriving home. “Hope for sustainable peace. Oleshky proves we can raise humanity above war,” she wrote. “Together, we can build a peaceful planet, a world of promise for our children.” In an interview with This Week on Capitol Hill, Zelensky thanked her and President Trump “for this mediation,” saying it brought medical equipment to the town’s hospital and cleared the roads.
In Washington, the National Cathedral and Ukraine’s embassy held an All Saints’ Day prayer service for Ukraine’s children, attended by hundreds, with prayers led partly by Ukrainian children, the cathedral’s third such service since 2022. “Those children who are no longer with us, those children who have been kidnapped by Russia,” said Denys Sienik, Ukraine’s acting ambassador. “No one is forgotten.” Ukraine has confirmed 20,610 cases of children deported or forcibly transferred to Russia, though Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets puts the real figure at up to 150,000 and children’s rights commissioner Daria Herasymchuk at 200,000 to 300,000. The UN has confirmed more than 3,900 children killed.
Spring 2027
Rubio does not expect Putin to agree to any settlement before spring 2027, RFE/RL’s Alex Raufoglu reported, citing three senior European officials, and called near-term Ukrainian NATO membership unrealistic because Moscow would never accept it. Rubio also doubted Putin would come to the G20 leaders’ summit in Miami on December 14 and 15, though the White House has invited him. The Kremlin says that depends on a Trump-Putin-Xi meeting at the APEC summit in Shenzhen on November 18 and 19.
Asked at a Halloween event at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday whether he would invite Zelensky too, Trump said: “Yes, no problem.” Rubio said that was the president’s decision but that he “wouldn’t rule out that possibility, especially if something positive could happen as a result of his participation.”
Also Today
The alert app hacked. Late at night, false alerts of nuclear, chemical and street-fighting threats appeared on Ukraine’s official Air Alert app, built by the Digital Transformation Ministry with security firm Ajax Systems, and sirens sounded as far west as Zakarpattia. “There is no radiation threat!” the Air Force said, and officials warned the messages might carry phishing links. The alerts were cleared within about an hour, the app’s team said it stores no personal data, and Kyiv residents were advised to use the Kyiv Digital app meanwhile. Early Monday, Russia’s emergencies ministry said its own app had been hacked.
An unofficial alert map developed by independent Ukrainian volunteer initiative Ukrzen depicting false alerts amid a cyberattack on Ukraine’s alert system late. (Ukrzen)
A drone over Latvia. “Go indoors, follow the two-wall principle!” Latvia’s military told residents near Kraslava and Ludza as an object, likely a drone, briefly entered Latvian airspace near the Russian and Belarusian borders; its origin is unclear. The military launched a BLAZE interceptor drone, then triggered its self-destruct so it would not stray into Russian or Belarusian airspace. On Saturday evening, drones also entered Moldovan and Romanian airspace during Russian strikes on western Ukraine; one stayed over Moldova for about 20 minutes, and Romania scrambled four F-16s and a helicopter.
Hockey and visas. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the Court of Arbitration for Sport is “staining the ice with Ukrainian blood” by letting Russia back into hockey and urged governments to deny Russian players visas. Finland’s foreign minister said she would act to bar Russian athletes. Sweden’s hockey chief, Anders Larsson, said the federation had no choice but to follow the ruling, “It feels anything but good,” and warned Russia’s return could push Ukraine out of the top division it just reached. Canada’s foreign minister said “all options are on the table” before the junior world championship there in December.
Poland’s tribunal. The European Commission backed the Polish parliament’s right to appoint eight new Constitutional Tribunal judges, after a standoff with President Karol Nawrocki and protests by the opposition Law and Justice party, whose leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, accused the government of turning Poland into “a police state.” “Our populist opposition is unfortunately refusing to accept its loss of control over the Tribunal,” Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski wrote.
Turkey and grain. In Istanbul, Zelensky and Erdogan agreed to back efforts to secure grain exports and shipping in the Black Sea, citing their free-trade agreement, in force since October 1, and Zelensky said Turkey will send energy equipment and generators. Rubio said interest in a limited Black Sea ceasefire is growing, including in Washington.
The Closing
Tonight, the guns around Oleshky can fire again. In Kozyatyn, a family that fled once already is mourning a 13-year-old girl. The October numbers say Russia is paying more than ever for less than ever. Ukraine is asking its friends to help it hold that line through the winter, before the next month’s count begins.
A Prayer for Ukraine
1. For Those Who Defend
Lord of hosts, bless the drone operators, the infantry and the gunners who held the line in October and took back what was stolen. Guard the defenders of Dobropillia, Kostiantynivka, Lyman and Hulyaipole, and every soldier who faces another winter in the trenches. Give them warmth, courage and rest, and bring them home to those who wait and pray for them.
2. For the Wounded and the Grieving
God of all comfort, receive the thirteen-year-old girl of Kozyatyn district and the one who died beside her, and the life lost in Sloviansk. Heal the three little children wounded at the dormitory, the boy of sixteen, and the wounded in Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy, Kharkiv, Poltava and Rivne regions. Comfort the families who fled their homes once only to grieve again tonight.
3. For Those Who Lead
King of kings, give President Zelensky perseverance as he asks for help that cannot wait for years. Move the leaders in Washington and Europe to send interceptors now, before the cold sets in, and grant every negotiator patience, courage and truth in every room. Let no summit decide Ukraine’s future without Ukraine, and let a just peace come sooner than spring.
4. For the Children of Ukraine
Faithful God, on All Saints’ Day we remember the children of Ukraine who were killed, and the more than twenty thousand taken to Russia. Hold the dead in Your arms, and bring the stolen home. Protect the twenty-two children carried out of the Kherson region today, and every child who sleeps in a shelter tonight. Let no child be forgotten.
5. For a People Who Keep Standing
Father, when false alarms sound and real ones follow, Ukraine keeps its calm and keeps going. Sustain the energy workers wounded at their posts, the rescuers who answer every call, and the families waiting in the dark for the lights. In Your mercy, in Your justice, in Your time — bring this war to its end, and let the ending be worthy of what Ukraine has endured.