Russian strikes kill at least nine people across Ukraine and knock out power in 12 regions, as Zelenskyy presses his case in Oslo

The diplomacy is moving in Oslo and Washington. The war is moving faster.

Ukrainian officials said Russian missile and drone attacks over the past day killed four people and wounded 27 in the Kyiv region, including children. Regional police said three people were killed and six wounded in the Obukhiv district, where warehouses were damaged, and that in the Bucha district one woman was killed and 21 people were wounded, eight of them children, while hundreds of buildings were damaged. On Tuesday morning, three more people were killed and four injured when two vehicles caught fire in a Russian attack on the Kyiv to Odesa highway, the State Emergency Service said. Among the dead was the driver of a shuttle bus that carries people from Kyiv to the National Military Memorial Cemetery. Two more people were killed in a Russian attack on warehouses on the outskirts of Dnipro, in central Ukraine, authorities said. The combined toll reported by officials on Tuesday was at least nine dead, as of October 20.

The strikes were aimed at the grid as much as at people. National grid operator Ukrenergo reported power outages in 12 regions of Ukraine following the attacks. Zelenskyy said the previous day’s energy barrage had left more than 500,000 people without electricity, heat or running water. It is the pattern Ukraine now faces every autumn, in its third iteration: strikes on power generation and distribution timed to falling temperatures, against a grid with less spare capacity than the year before.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces carried out drone strikes on logistics centres, port infrastructure and three cargo ships in the port of Reni in the Odesa region, and that another bulk carrier was hit at sea on its way to Odesa. The ministry also said Russian air defences intercepted 136 Ukrainian drones over multiple Russian regions overnight. None of those claims could be independently verified on Tuesday.

Zelenskyy spent the day in Oslo meeting US negotiators, the envoy Steve Witkoff among them, and announced one concrete change: Kyiv is again receiving partner early warnings of incoming Russian missiles. For at least a week, he said, Ukraine had received no early warning of ballistic missiles aimed at Kyiv, and strikes had arrived without enough notice, leaving civilians exposed. He said the change followed talks with American counterparts, including a phone call with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whom he thanked for a clear position and a readiness to help. Rubio, speaking to reporters in India, acknowledged frustration on both sides but denied that the administration had changed policy on intelligence sharing or weapons supplies, denied withholding assistance, and said Patriot interceptor ammunition is in short supply and needed elsewhere. Zelenskyy had told a bipartisan group of US lawmakers on Monday that he believed a political decision had been made to slow support, that Ukraine has nearly run out of US made Patriot interceptors, that the Pentagon is delaying missiles other countries bought for Ukraine, and that speed restrictions on Starshield, the military version of the Starlink satellite service, are hampering battlefield operations. On the ground in Ukraine, the argument is simpler, and it is measured in megawatts and cold apartments: every week of delay in October is a week the grid enters winter weaker than it was.