Russia’s Justice Ministry has added Diana “Naoko” Loginova, the vocalist for the band Stoptime, to its registry of “foreign agents.”

The ministry also added Loginova’s fiancé, Stoptime guitarist Alexander Orlov, to the list.

Another new addition to the registry is the Malinovy Klin Nezavisimaya Kuban (Raspberry Wedge Independent Kuban) movement.

Stoptime is a street band from St. Petersburg that became known for covering songs by musicians designated as “foreign agents.”

In the fall of 2025, the band’s members were detained and subjected to a series of “revolving-door arrests” for allegedly organizing a mass gathering in a public place. In total, the musicians spent more than a month in a detention center. After their release, Loginova and Orlov left Russia. They recorded their first album while living abroad.

More from Meduza

• A Russian lawmaker offered to make Stoptime’s teenage frontwoman a patriotic star — if she’d repent on camera. Diana Loginova chose exile instead, and the band just released its first album.
• ‘I thought, what could they do to me?’ Russian street singer Diana Loginova, jailed for performing anti-war songs, gives first major interview in exile
• Nothing but the anti-Kremlin hits Performing songs by blacklisted musicians made this Russian street band famous. Then it landed them in jail.

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The Turkish criminal gang known as the Daltons may have been involved in the arson attack on a Starlink satellite ground station in the village of Wola Krobowska in Poland’s Masovian province, Der Spiegel reported, citing sources.

The ground station caught fire on September 23. Polish authorities called the fire a deliberate act of sabotage and blamed Russia. According to Spiegel, Russian intelligence services may have hired the Daltons to carry out the attack.

On October 12, two Turkish citizens suspected of involvement in the arson attack were arrested in the German town of Nürtingen at Poland’s request. Spiegel identified the men as 38-year-old Ümit E. and 34-year-old Müslüm T. The outlet said they likely belong to the Daltons — or at least may have acted at the direction of the gang’s supporters.

A court in Stuttgart is expected to decide in the coming days whether to extradite the two men to Poland.

Spiegel reported that Russian intelligence services have so far relied primarily on “low-level agents,” such as petty criminals who took on jobs for small amounts of money, to carry out sabotage in Europe. If it is confirmed that Daltons supporters were involved in the arson attack on the Starlink terminal in Poland, that would signal a shift in Russian intelligence strategy, the outlet said.

The Daltons gang was formed in 2024. According to the Azerbaijani news site Haqqin.az, its members were mostly young people born in 2000 or later. In Turkey, the Daltons were involved in the killing of Serdar Öktem, a prominent lawyer and member of the Nationalist Movement Party, who was shot dead in his car in Istanbul. Gang members also operated in Germany and other European countries, where they engaged in extorting protection money, arms trafficking, and contract killings.

The leader of the Daltons, Beratcan Gökdemir, was arrested in Russia in 2024, Spiegel reported. Turkey demanded his extradition, but Russia never handed him over. Experts speculated that the Kremlin might have hoped to get something from the Daltons in return. It remains unclear whether Gökdemir is still in Russia.

Plots and attacks in Europe

• U.S. uncovers network that plotted assassinations of Russian ‘dissidents’ in Washington and Vilnius. Among the suspects: an ex-colonel with Putin ties, his FSB officer son, and a Cuban dancer.
• Russia is escalating its hybrid attacks on the West. Moscow will make Europe’s life ‘hell’ for supporting Ukraine, Kremlin insider tells Bloomberg.
• Unmasking Moscow’s sex toy bombers Journalists expose the operatives behind Russia’s European package plot

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Donald Trump said he had not ordered restrictions on Starshield, the military version of Starlink, in Ukraine.

“Well, I don’t know if it was anybody, because it wasn’t me. And I don’t think it was Elon [Musk],” Trump told reporters.

Trump said he had checked that morning and everything was working as usual. He said he was “not even sure” Starlink had stopped working in Ukraine.

On October 14, Ukrainian military personnel reported restrictions affecting their Starlink satellite communications terminals — specifically, the military version, Starshield. The restrictions caused some Ukrainian military missions to fail.

The following day, a senior U.S. administration official told Axios that the White House had nothing to do with the restrictions on Starlink in Ukraine. However, sources cited by Reuters said the White House had ordered restrictions on Starshield. They did not specify who had given the order.

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Russia expects to force Ukraine to capitulate this coming winter by disabling its energy system, particularly by leaving Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa without electricity, heat, or water, The New York Times reported. The newspaper reviewed a Russian government plan that Ukraine intercepted and showed to its European allies in September.

According to the plan, Russia would need about 70 ballistic missiles, 720 long-range drones, and 150 guided aerial bombs to cut off water, electricity, and heat to Ukraine’s three largest cities. Russian military planners believe a month of strikes at that intensity would destroy Ukraine’s energy system.

With the war now in its fifth year, previous attacks have left Ukrainian power plants unable to operate at full capacity, and each new strike quickly knocks them offline, the newspaper reported. Before the war, for example, the three combined heat and power plants supplying Kyiv had a total generating capacity of about 1.3 gigawatts. That has now fallen to about 500 megawatts.

If Russia’s plan succeeds, Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa could lose 90% of their power generating capacity and see heat supplies cut by 90%, disrupting water and sewage systems, according to the newspaper.

Russia’s confidence that the plan can work stems largely from Ukraine’s shortage of air defenses, particularly Patriot interceptor missiles, without which Ukrainian forces are virtually unable to defend against ballistic missiles.

Analysts agree that Moscow now has a better chance of succeeding in its air campaign than at any other point in the war. Ukraine’s missile defenses have been depleted by cuts in American aid, Russia’s missile and drone arsenal has grown more powerful and effective, and years of strikes have left Ukraine’s energy infrastructure far more vulnerable.

This makes Moscow extremely unlikely to agree to any version of the energy ceasefire Kyiv has repeatedly proposed. “The only card they have to pressure the Ukrainians are these air attacks. They don’t have anything else,” Harry Nedelcu, a director at the consulting firm Rasmussen Global, told The New York Times.

But history shows that such bombing campaigns, which devastate economies and civilian life, usually fail to force an enemy to surrender, the newspaper reported. The United States failed to achieve its aims this way in Vietnam, during the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s, and in the current war against Iran.

“Punishing the adversaries’ civilian population and trying to break its will has a very poor historical track record for coercing it to concede defeat,” Seth Jones, a military expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the newspaper.

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An immigration raid is underway in central St. Petersburg, where OMON riot police have cordoned off a block on Moskovsky Prospekt near Sennoy Market. The block includes a prayer room attended by about 1,000 worshipers, a law enforcement source told TASS.

Officers are also checking nearby hostels and cafes. Several dozen people have been detained, journalists said. Officers are checking registration documents, migration cards, and work permits.

Enlistment officers are taking part in the raid, checking whether recently naturalized Russian citizens have registered with the military. “So far, several dozen people have been identified and served summonses to report to a military enlistment office for registration,” the TASS source said.

Read more

• Russia is filling its ranks with foreign fighters and treating them as ‘disposable soldiers’
• ‘They’re grabbing everyone’: Russian military enlistment officers are rounding up men en masse in Penza, residents say
• Russian police are raiding gyms, sweeping up men for conscription and deportation

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Pope Leo XIV spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin and the Vatican said.

During the call, the pope expressed “deep concern” about the dire humanitarian situation in Oleshky, in the Kherson region, and called for a ceasefire to allow deliveries of humanitarian aid and the safe, voluntary evacuation of civilians.

Putin gave the pope “comprehensive explanations of the Kyiv regime’s responsibility” for “the humanitarian situation that has developed in Oleshky,” the Kremlin said. “Support was expressed for the Vatican’s intention to help create conditions that would keep the city’s residents safe and allow essential supplies to be delivered. The two sides agreed to cooperate on this,” the Kremlin press service said in a statement.

The pope is in the hospital after being diagnosed with lung adenocarcinoma. He has undergone surgery and is recovering but remains under medical supervision.

Residents of Oleshky (known in Russian as Alyoshki), in the Kherson region, have lived under Russian occupation since 2022, but this fall conditions there have become dire, verging on a humanitarian catastrophe. Constant drone attacks have left residents without food, electricity, or adequate medical care. They cannot safely leave the city and sometimes cannot even bury loved ones who have been killed.

Read more

• ‘The smell of death is everywhere’: Inside the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Russian-occupied Oleshky, where hundreds are trapped without food, electricity, or medicine
• A humanitarian crisis is gripping Russian-occupied Oleshky as food deliveries stop and safe evacuation becomes nearly impossible
• Pope Leo XIV urges European leaders to be willing to make concessions to help end Russia–Ukraine war — but doesn’t say what should be conceded

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European leaders did not press Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to tone down his remarks about U.S. President Donald Trump during their meeting in Brussels, diplomatic sources told Politico.

“What do you expect him [Zelenskyy] to do? He’s desperate, and the situation is as bad as it can get,” one of the sources told the outlet.

The previous day, the Financial Times reported that EU leaders planned to urge Zelensky to tone down his criticism of Trump, fearing that the Ukrainian president’s increasingly sharp remarks could further damage the already strained relationship between Washington and Kyiv.

Read more

• Trump calls for Ukraine to choose a new president as relations with Zelensky hit their lowest point since Oval Office clash
• European allies publicly back Zelensky after Trump says Ukraine needs a new president
• Zelensky has a message for Washington: Don’t call peace impossible while refusing to put more pressure on Putin

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Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky District Court has ordered Oleg Shorin, the former director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Library for Natural Sciences, held in custody on charges of large-scale fraud, Kommersant reported.

The basis for the charges is unknown.

Shorin stepped down as the library’s director in December 2023. In June of that year, Moscow’s Khamovnichesky District Court fined the library 141,000 rubles for misusing 2.8 million rubles in public funds, according to Kommersant.

The library told Kommersant it did not know why its former director was being prosecuted.

Shorin graduated from the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Lomonosov Moscow State University. From 2011 to 2018, he worked at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg. He then became director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Library for Natural Sciences, where he worked on digitizing the library. In 2023, he left that position and became director of digital transformation at Rently, where he was responsible for the strategic development of a cloud-based software-as-a-service platform.

More from Meduza

• Russia’s Institute of Philosophy raided over fraud case tied to Aristotle translation project — the institute had previously been accused of disloyalty to the Kremlin.
• The case against Russia’s ‘extremist librarian’ How the head of Moscow’s Ukrainian literature library landed in court

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declined to discuss his relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump at a news conference in Brussels.

A Sky News reporter asked Zelensky whether he believes Trump is using him as a scapegoat for his own low approval ratings ahead of the U.S. congressional elections.

Zelensky fell silent for a few seconds, then smiled pointedly. When other reporters in the room started laughing, too, he said, “This is my answer.” He then left the news conference.

Earlier in the news conference, Zelensky said Starlink service in Ukraine has not yet been fully restored and again reported a “significant shortage” of Patriot missiles. He said he had asked the United States for additional interceptors to cover the period during which Ukraine would refrain from striking oil refineries in Russia, but the United States refused.

In recent weeks, Donald Trump has demanded that Ukraine stop striking oil refineries in Russia, claiming the strikes — not the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, caused by the war the United States and Israel started against Iran — are driving up global diesel prices.

Under pressure from Trump, Ukraine agreed not to strike Russian oil refineries on the understanding that Russia should reduce its attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. That did not happen, and three days into the pause, Zelensky said Ukraine’s armed forces are resuming their strikes.

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A group of U.S. congressmen has proposed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky halt strikes on Russian oil refineries in exchange for an expanded Starlink coverage zone for Ukraine’s armed forces, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The lawmakers raised the idea at a meeting in Kyiv last Friday. Under the plan, the U.S. would extend the Starlink coverage zone 300 kilometers (186 miles) into Russian territory in exchange for Ukraine halting the strikes, allowing Ukraine’s armed forces to destroy Russian launch systems.

Zelensky signaled he was willing to accept the proposal and halt strikes on Russian oil refineries for 100 days, WSJ reported.

The newspaper did not say whether the congressmen were acting as envoys for U.S. President Donald Trump or were advancing the proposal on their own initiative.

Trump has publicly demanded for several weeks that Ukraine halt strikes on Russian oil refineries. In mid-October, he said Moscow and Kyiv had agreed to an “energy truce,” meaning a mutual halt to attacks on oil refineries.

Ukraine did refrain from striking Russian oil refineries for several days, Kyiv said, but on October 15, Zelensky announced that the strikes would resume because Russia, he said, had continued to attack Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Moscow claimed there had never actually been a moratorium on Kyiv’s part.

Starlink service is currently limited to Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. The Atlantic reported in August that former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov had unofficially tried to persuade SpaceX owner Elon Musk to expand Starlink’s coverage zone for Ukraine’s armed forces so Ukraine could strike Russian missile launch systems. Musk refused, warning of the risks of escalation, according to the magazine.

Ukrainian authorities are looking for ways to strike Russian missile launch systems amid a critical shortage of Patriot missiles, which has left Ukraine effectively defenseless against Russian ballistic attacks. Zelensky, who announced yesterday that strikes on oil refineries would resume, stressed that he is willing to soften his position if allies supply Kyiv with more Patriot missiles.

War in photographs. Kharkiv

On the morning of October 16, Russian drones attacked an outdoor market in Kharkiv. Two vendors — a 71-year-old woman and a 58-year-old man — were killed and 13 other people were injured, authorities said.

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Cover photo: Florian Gaertner / Photothek / Getty Images

Dozens of court hearings in Russia were disrupted due to “technical malfunctions” after strikes by Ukraine’s armed forces on Yandex data centers, the independent Russian news outlet Verstka reported.

Hearings began to be canceled on October 8, when Ukraine struck a Yandex data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region. PravoTech, the company that services the electronic system for Russia’s arbitration courts, sent out notices about a “mass outage” at the Yandex Cloud data center.

The outage affected arbitration courts in the Sverdlovsk, Smolensk, Tula, Kostroma, Ivanovo, and Yaroslavl regions, as well as Altai Krai and the Volga district. The courts could not hold online hearings, make audio and video recordings, or process documents in the “Moy Arbitr” (“My Arbitrator”) system.

As a result, dozens of hearings had to be postponed or interrupted between October 8 and 14, and some petitions were left unconsidered. By October 16, the problem had not been fully resolved, the outlet said. Case files on the courts’ websites are not opening, and files containing rulings cannot be downloaded.

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Ukrainian drones struck Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug–Yugra, Governor Ruslan Kukharuk said.

The drones hit an industrial facility in the Surgut district, where a fire broke out, he said.

“Emergency services are working at the scene. Specialists are currently assessing the scale and nature of the damage caused. I am personally overseeing the situation,” the governor said. He did not provide further details, including which enterprise was hit.

Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug lies more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) from Ukraine.

The Ukrainian monitoring Telegram channel Exilenova+ says the Surgut Gas Condensate Stabilization Plant named after Viktor Chernomyrdin (a Gazprom subsidiary) was hit.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin transferred the Russian business of French flooring maker Tarkett and four other major companies with combined revenue of 53 billion rubles to the management of Marat Mirkhaidarov, a former deputy premier of Zabaikalsky Krai, the independent Russian investigative outlets The Insider and Agentstvo found.

Control over the companies passed to Center Capital Management Company LLC. Two companies registered in Russia carry that name, and one belongs to Mirkhaidarov, The Insider found.

Mirkhaidarov served as deputy chairman of the Zabaikalsky Krai government until March 2025. In January 2024, he volunteered to fight in the war against Ukraine with the Chechen battalion “Akhmat,” spending four months at the front. He resigned afterward, citing the need to recover from a battlefield injury.

Mirkhaidarov personally confirmed receiving the assets in a conversation with Agentstvo. He called the decision “the political will of our president” and said he was ready to return the assets at Putin’s first request.

He asked journalists not to report on the transfer of the companies.

Right now we’re giving our enemies a chance to discuss what was transferred, to whom it was transferred, and why it was transferred. We’re giving our enemies, the psy-ops crowd, a chance to dig around. To dig around in my life story, in my family.

Asked whether the change in management might interest Russian businessmen, Mirkhaidarov replied that the business “still belongs, as it always did,” to its foreign owners.

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