Here are the key events from day 1,332 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Published On 18 Oct 2025
Here is how things stand on Saturday, October 18, 2025:
Fighting
- Ukrainian shelling killed two adults and a 10-year-old child in Russian-occupied Kherson, Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-appointed governor of the region, wrote in a post on Telegram.
- Russian attacks on Ukraine’s Sumy region killed a 38-year-old man and injured four others, the regional administration wrote in a post on Telegram.
- Russian attacks also injured at least eight people in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv regions, according to local officials.
- Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces claimed a Ukrainian drone attack destroyed an oil depot and a gas treatment plant in Russian-occupied Crimea on Friday night.
- The Russian-installed governor of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, said that a Ukrainian drone attack damaged several electrical substations in the Russian-occupied region, according to Russia’s state-run TASS news agency.
- Russian forces shelled Ukraine’s Chernihiv region 68 times in a 24-hour period, causing fires at a logging company and damaging residential areas, Regional Governor Vyacheslav Chaus said.
- Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova called for relevant United Nations bodies to condemn the Ukrainian attack that killed Russian war correspondent Ivan Zuyev and seriously wounded his colleague in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region on Thursday.
Politics and diplomacy
- United States President Donald Trump met his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on Friday, telling reporters he was optimistic about ending the war. “I think we have a chance of ending the war quickly if flexibility is shown,” Trump told reporters.
- Zelenskyy congratulated Trump on his “successful ceasefire” in the Middle East, saying that while “Putin is not ready”, he is confident that with Trump’s “help, we can stop this war, and we really need it”.
- Trump did not commit to Zelenskyy’s request for Tomahawk missiles, which are precise, long-range projectiles that Kyiv is seeking in order to strike deep into Russia, saying doing so “could mean big escalation”.
- Trump also told reporters that Zelenskyy will “be in touch” during upcoming negotiations in Hungary, where the US president will meet with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
- Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said his country would allow Putin to attend the planned summit with Trump in Budapest, despite the Russian leader facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC), which Hungary is in the process of leaving.
- Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s investment envoy, proposed building a “US-Russia link via the Bering Strait” in a post on X, also suggesting that the undersea tunnel connecting Russia and the US could be built together with billionaire Elon Musk’s The Boring Company.
- Asked about the tunnel proposal on Friday, Trump said it was “interesting”, while Zelenskyy said: “I’m not happy with this idea.”
- United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer held a call with Zelenskyy after his White House meeting, where he “reiterated their unwavering commitment to Ukraine in the face of ongoing Russian aggression”, according to a summary of the call published by Downing Street.