Vladimir Putin said Russian forces have been ordered to prepare mass strikes on Ukraine's energy facilities ahead of winter, while Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned commercial airlines and insurers that Russian airspace is becoming unsafe due to Ukrainian drone operations targeting sites more than 2,000 km from the border. Putin framed Zelenskyy's warning as state terrorism and said Russia remained open to concrete talks if new momentum emerged. The exchange followed a two-day summit in Kyrgyzstan where Putin claimed Russian troops captured 270 square km of Donetsk in August and surrounded a large group of Ukrainian forces.
Ukraine's commercial airspace has been closed since February 2022, but Zelenskyy said the growing number of attack drones entering Russia, with a stated target of 1,000 a day, must be taken into account by aviation users. Putin said Russian forces retained the initiative on the battlefield, pushing back against Western intelligence reports that he receives an overly optimistic picture. He declined to say when the conflict would end, and called speculation about a new Russian mobilisation utter nonsense.
Putin's claim that Russian forces captured the Donetsk town of Sviatohirsk was not supported by battlefield maps from the Ukrainian monitoring group DeepState, and pro-war Russian blogger Alexei Larkin wrote that the assertion was simply a lie. Reuters said it could not independently verify Putin's claim that 270 square km of Donetsk had been taken in August. The disputed status of Sviatohirsk and unverified territorial figures remain unresolved points in the Russian leader's account.