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Explosions rang out in Western Ukraine’s Lviv and Lutsk overnight amid Russian missile strikes. In Lutsk, an industrial plant was hit, and in Lviv, residential buildings were targeted, officials said. Three people were killed in the Lutsk strike, according to preliminary information, the city’s mayor said on Telegram.
The Russian Central Bank has called a meeting on Tuesday to discuss the level of its key interest rate after the ruble fell to its lowest point in 17 months, briefly sliding past 102 to the dollar on Monday.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
An evacuation was underway in Lviv after a fire at a residential building hit in the Russian strike, Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said on Telegram. In Lutsk, emergency service crews were on-site at the industrial plant, Mayor Ihor Polishchuk said on Telegram.
The U.S. ambassador to Russia, Lynne Tracy, met with jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on Monday at Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, the newspaper reported. The reporter appeared to be in good health and remains strong, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow told the Journal after the meeting, the third since his arrest in July.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had “frank conversations” with troops during a visit Monday to the front line in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, amid the ongoing counteroffensive that many have deemed to be slower than expected. “We talked about our offensive, about supplies to the troops, about the capabilities of commanders, about what these capabilities are now and what they should be,” Zelensky said of the visit in his nightly address.
More than 20 Russian diplomats and their families left Moldova on Monday, local media reported, weeks after the country asked Russia to reduce its staff in the capital, Chisinau, amid deteriorating ties between the two countries. Russia’s Foreign Ministry called it an “unfriendly step” that will adversely affect relations.
A Russian MiG-29 fighter jet prevented a Norwegian air force patrol and reconnaissance plane on Monday from crossing the Russian border, over the Barents Sea, the Russian state media agency Tass reported, citing the Defense Ministry. “The foreign aircraft turned away from the Russian border as the Russian fighter jet approached,” the statement said.
The ruble takes a dive, underscoring pressure on Russia’s war economy: The Russian currency has lost almost a quarter of its value against the dollar since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, report Francesca Ebel and Isabelle Khurshudyan. Russia’s Central Bank said the ruble’s fall would not impact the country’s overall financial stability and blamed the situation on uneven trade balance, which has been impacted by Western sanctions.
The new drop was part of a “permanent trend of depreciation” and acceleration, said Oleg Itskhoki, a professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles, rather than a spontaneous crisis. “Perhaps the current acceleration will lead to a tsunami depreciation, but this has not happened in the past,” he said.
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