Russian forces shot down 36 Ukrainian drones overnight from Saturday to Sunday over the Black Sea and the Crimean peninsula, the Russian Defense Ministry announced. “On the night of October 29, an attempt by the Kiev regime to carry out a terrorist attack using aerial-type drones on the territory of the Russian Federation was stopped,” the ministry said on Telegram.
“The existing air defense systems destroyed 36 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles over the Black Sea and the northwestern part of the Crimean peninsula,” he added.
Airport targeted by a crowd hostile to Israel: the head of the Republic of Dagestan accuses Ukraine
Russian police said this Monday, October 30, that they had arrested 60 people suspected of having stormed an airport in Makhachkala, capital of the predominantly Muslim Russian republic of Dagestan, apparently in search of passengers coming from Israel. A crowd of men invaded the tarmac and the airport terminal on Sunday evening, amid tensions across the world since Israel’s campaign of retaliation in Gaza launched after Hamas’ surprise attack on October 7.
During clashes with the attackers at Makhachkala airport, nine police officers were injured, two of whom were hospitalized, the Russian Interior Ministry said in a statement. “More than 150 active participants in the unrest have been identified, sixty of them have been arrested,” said the ministry, assuring that search operations were underway to identify all the attackers.
The leader of this Russian Caucasian republic, Sergei Melikov, assured Monday morning, without providing evidence, that these unrest had been organized from Ukrainian territory, in the midst of an armed conflict between Kiev and Moscow. “The initiators of this action, obviously, are our enemies, those who organized these actions from the territory of Ukraine,” he told the press, quoted by the Ria-Novosti news agency.
He claimed that a Telegram channel critical of local authorities, “Outro Dagestan”, was administered by “traitors” from Ukraine. This channel, followed by around 60,000 people, shared a call to gather at Makhachkala airport on Sunday evening, saying they wanted to prevent the arrival of “unwanted” passengers from the Red Wings flight from Tel Aviv.
Russians commemorate Stalin’s victims despite repression of opponents
Russians paid tribute on Sunday to the victims of Stalinist terror, more than 20 months after the launch of the Russian offensive in Ukraine which was accompanied by strong domestic repression of critical voices. The reading of the names of people executed during the terror between 1936 and 1938 is organized each year by the NGO Memorial, co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize and which Russian justice ordered to be dissolved at the end of 2021, a few weeks before the assault on Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
In Moscow, this reading is traditionally organized near a monument to the victims of Soviet repression, located opposite Lubyanka, the infamous headquarters of Stalin’s political police, the Soviet KGB and today the FSB, the services Russian security forces. Memorial, however, announced that the authorities had banned the gathering on Lubyanka. On Sunday, the site was surrounded by metal barriers with a heavy police presence.
Oleg Orlov, a Memorial official recently fined for denouncing the offensive against Ukraine, was nevertheless present on site. And several Western ambassadors, including those from France and the United States, laid flowers. Banned from Lubyanka, Memorial therefore organized a reading of the names in symbolic places in the capital, such as old addresses of victims of repression, cemeteries and in front of a prison. The event was also held in other Russian cities such as Volgograd, the former Stalingrad, or in Novosibirsk in Siberia as well as abroad.
Chinese and Russian officials slam countries ‘creating problems’
A senior Chinese army official, General Zhang Youxia, vice-president of the Central Military Commission, and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu accused certain countries on Monday of wanting to “create problems” in Asia and elsewhere, during a defense forum in Beijing.
The two men each delivered a speech at the Xiangshan Forum, which brings together military and diplomats from 90 countries. China is holding this forum in the absence of a Chinese Defense Minister in office, after the announcement last week of the dismissal, without official explanation, of Li Shangfu.
China has refused to condemn the invasion of Ukraine and seeks to position itself as a neutral party in the conflict, while offering Moscow vital diplomatic and financial assistance. Russian President Vladimir Putin made a two-day visit to Beijing this month, his first trip to a major world power since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which isolated Russia on the international stage.