Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy once again acknowledged the “very, very difficult” situation his military is facing after his air defenses were forced to destroy multiple waves of Russian drones targeting the capital, while his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, used a state holiday to repeat a pledge to achieve his aims in Ukraine.
Following a meeting on September 30 with top commanders, Zelenskiy said that “reports on each of our frontline sectors, our capabilities, our future capabilities and our specific tasks: The situation is very, very difficult.
“Everything that can be done this autumn, everything that we can achieve must be achieved,” he said in his nightly video address.
Zelenskiy stressed the importance of the upcoming Ukraine Defense Contract Meeting at the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany and stressed the need to make gains ahead of the gathering to assure Western allies of Ukraine’s ability to make battlefield gains.
“It depends on everyone in the Ukrainian team. Now we have to work as hard as we can before Ramstein,” he added, referring to the scheduled October 12 meeting.
On the battlefield, Serhiy Popko, the head of the military administration in Kyiv, said there had been no damage after “waves” of incoming attack drones were destroyed over the course of a five-hour air alert in the city that began around 1 a.m. local time on September 30. It was the 10th Russian air attack on the Ukrainian capital this month.
The Kyiv regionwide military administration commander, Ruslan Kravchenko, said later that debris from destroyed drones fell in six districts but caused no casualties and only minor damage.
Ukrainian military authorities said four people had died and 37 more had been injured by Russian air strikes over the past 24 hours in the Donetsk, Kherson, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhzhya regions.
They said Russia launched 73 attack drones and three missiles overnight in all, and that Ukrainian air defenses downed 67 of the drones and one of the missiles.
In Russia, Putin vowed to achieve his goals in Ukraine in a September 30 video message to coincide with the anniversary of his unilateral declaration in 2022 purporting to annex four Ukrainian regions partly controlled by Russian troops.
The United Nations has passed multiple resolutions confirming Ukraine’s territory and sovereignty since Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched its support of separatists in eastern Ukraine eight years before the full-scale invasion began in February 2022
“The truth is on our side,” Putin said in the message. “All goals set will be achieved.”
The Russian government on September 30 announced plans to increase defense spending by some 30 percent in 2025 as the long war in Ukraine — initially anticipated by the Kremlin to be a short, swift, and victorious invasion — has dragged on for 31 months.
A draft budget indicated that Russia plans to raise defense spending next year to 13.5 trillion rubles ($145 billion), diverting more resources to the war in Ukraine even as the country’s economy continues to stagger in the face of Western sanctions.
Putin also signed a decree on a regular fall recruitment of males for mandatory military service, with some 133,000 men aged 18-30 expected to join Russia’s forces. Putin has been reluctant to announce extra, irregular mobilizations, fearing a mass exodus of men to other countries similar to what happened following his decree in September 2022 in the early months of the war.
Unprecedented Western military and other support for Ukraine has continued despite fears of “Ukraine fatigue” among backers and Moscow’s persistent efforts to undermine European unity.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha traveled on September 30 to Budapest to attempt to bolster support in Hungary, which despite being a NATO and EU member, has been reluctant to back Ukraine’s war against Russia.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is the only EU leader to have maintained close ties with Putin following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 and has not provided military assistance.
