Here are the highlights of events related to the war in Ukraine over the past 24 hours:

Ukraine, Turkey and the UN have agreed on a plan for the movement of 16 ships along the maritime humanitarian corridor

The Joint Coordination Center reported that Ukraine, Turkey and the United Nations agreed on a plan to move 16 ships along the Black Sea Maritime Humanitarian Corridor on October 31 as part of the Black Sea Grain Initiative. In accordance with the center's procedures, all participants will coordinate their actions with the relevant military and other authorities to ensure the safe passage of merchant ships under the Black Sea Grain Initiative.

According to the latest information, 6 ships carrying over 186,000 tons of grain and other food products have left the Ukrainian ports of Yuzhny, Chernomorsk and Odesa today, but have not yet entered the maritime humanitarian corridor. Ships should head to the Netherlands, Great Britain, Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt and Turkey.

More than 200 cargo ships are practically blocked as a result of Russia's refusal to fulfill the agreement to export grain from Ukrainian ports, Kyiv said. About half of these vessels are empty and awaiting access to Odessa after inspections. The others are either stuck in ports or have left them, but are also awaiting inspections.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar today set out to negotiate with Moscow and Kyiv to re-unblock exports, but according to trade consultants cited yesterday by Reuters, there is little confidence in these diplomatic efforts and expects wheat prices on international markets to jump by 5 to 10% on Monday.

The Turkish Minister of Defense has asked his Ukrainian colleague Oleksiy Reznikov and the Russian - Sergei Shoigu to refrain from provocations that could negatively affect the implementation of the agreement.

Moscow justified its decision to abandon food export arrangements with the jaw-dropping Black Sea fleet.

Yesterday, the Russian Ministry of Defense said that at least one of the naval drones used in the attack had passed through the so-called "grain corridor" and was even likely to have been launched from one of the civilian vessels sailing along the corridor.

In response, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba accused the Russian leadership of continuing to play with the hunger of millions of people around the world and stressed that the explosions in Sevastopol were 220 km from the grain shipping corridor.

It will be possible to talk about the possibility of Russia returning to the grain deal only after all the circumstances surrounding the attack on the ships of the Black Sea Fleet in the waters of Sevastopol become known, said Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrey Rudenko. According to the diplomat, the attack, which was allegedly carried out under the guise of the grain corridor, was in violation of all agreements reached so far.

Rudenko also recalled that Moscow requested the convening of the UN Security Council to discuss this issue.

Zelensky: Russia is to blame for the food crisis

Ukrainian forces have repelled a Russian advance in the Donetsk region. This was announced by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his traditional evening address.

He also accused Russia of blackmailing the world with hunger after it withdrew from the so-called Black Sea Food Export Initiative from Black Sea Ports of Ukraine. Moscow said Saturday's drone attack on Black Sea Fleet ships in Sevastopol used the sea corridor for grain exports from Ukrainian ports. Zelensky denied these claims.

"Russia is solely to blame for the fact that now food will become more expensive for people in a huge area of ​​the world - from West Africa to East Asia. Russia is the reason why people, in particular in Ethiopia, Yemen or Somalia, are facing catastrophic food shortages. Of course, the partners are trying to convince the terrorist state to slow down the blackmail a bit. But is this realistic? So far, the facts show that the Russian leadership is more interested in exacerbating the food crisis than in implementing the signed documents. And this is the answer to all those who talk about negotiations with Russia", noted the Ukrainian president

Zelensky added that 218 ships are waiting for an opportunity to transport food under export contracts or to dock in Ukrainian ports.

Lavrov once again emphasized readiness for negotiations to overcome the Ukrainian crisis

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov once again emphasized the readiness for negotiations to overcome the Ukrainian crisis.

"President Putin has repeatedly spoken about the fact that we have never given up and do not give up on negotiations. He warned that those who quit should understand that the longer they delay negotiations, the harder it will be for them to negotiate later. In his speech on September 30, Putin once again called on the Kyiv regime to end hostilities and come to the negotiating table. But the West once again let this go ‘through the ears’, and Zelensky said that he will not negotiate with the current president of Russia," Lavrov said in a TV interview broadcast by the Russian Foreign Ministry.

In the same speech he quoted, Vladimir Putin declared more than 100,000 square kilometers of Ukrainian lands in Zaporizhzhia, Donbas and Kherson to be annexed to the Russian Federation.

In his interview today, Lavrov compared the Ukrainian crisis to the Caribbean crisis 60 years ago, when the Soviet Union and the United States reached the brink of nuclear conflict. According to Lavrov, the initiator of the then crisis was the United States because of the deployment of missiles in Turkey. Today, Moscow sees a similar threat in arming Ukraine:

"Back in 1962, Nikita Khrushchev and John Kennedy found the strength to show responsibility and wisdom. Today, however, we do not see such wisdom on the part of Washington and its satellites.”

The West began arming Kyiv with salvo fire systems with a range of up to 80 kilometers only in May, three months after the Russian army invaded Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities' push for longer-range systems has so far been rejected.

New explosions in Kyiv, Kharkiv was hit by rockets

A series of explosions were heard in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on Monday morning, according to witnesses in the city quoted by Reuters.

According to witnesses, smoke rose over Kyiv after about 10 explosions. Electricity and mobile networks have been cut off in parts of the city.

So far, there is no information about the attacked objects and about injured people.

Regional authorities in northern, eastern and central Ukraine also reported rocket strikes.

Igor Terekhov, the mayor of Kharkiv, said the city had been hit by two missiles aimed at a "critical infrastructure facility".

Russia has stepped up missile attacks on Ukraine in recent weeks after blaming Kyiv for the explosion that damaged the Crimean bridge.

⚡️ Air defense work in the Kyiv region. Video from subscribers.

???? Follow @Flash_news_ua pic.twitter.com/V94lrGuUSI

— FLASH (@Flash_news_ua) October 31, 2022

Russia began to seize enterprises in the annexed territories

Russia has begun taking over businesses and enterprises in the parts of Ukraine illegally annexed a month ago, and a special government commission has been created for this purpose. This comes after Vladimir Putin imposed martial law in these lands on October 19, a regime in which a significant portion of civil laws cease to apply.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, called these "abandoned and discarded assets in the new regions of Russia that should not sit idle." According to him, "someone has to include them in their balance to activate them", and their previous owners can claim their rights over these assets, but already according to Russian legislation and before Russian courts.

The main criterion for gaining access to their management is the desire and ability to invest in the development of such enterprises, a Russian lawmaker explained. First of all, these will be Russian state companies.

It is about "non-working business" in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, as well as in the so-called Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic. Russia does not even control 100% of their territory and in several places along the front the Ukrainian army is on the offensive.

These are objects such as:

• metallurgical plant "Azovstal"
• Mariupol Metallurgical Combine "Ilych"
• iron ore plant in Berdyansk
• Mariupol commercial seaport
• other ports located on the Dnieper River and along the shores of the Sea of ​​Azov and the Black Sea
• "North Donets Nitrogen"
• "Artyomsol" for extraction of table salt
• coal-fired power plants
• Zaporizhzhia NPP.
• the petrochemical "NPP Agrinol" and PJSC "Azmol" in Zaporizhzhia region
• PJSC "Berdyanskie Zatki" machine-building company

A number of enterprises are actually already under the so-called external control, recalls "Vedomosti". Metallurgical, chemical and mining enterprises in the DPR and LPR are managed by a specially created organization "Southern Mining and Metallurgical Complex" (YUMK), headed by Russian businessman Yevgeny Yurchenko. In an interview from last summer, he stated that more than 1 million tons of steel products were produced in the seven enterprises, the leading among them being the Alchevsk Metallurgical Combine. In July 2022, an agreement was signed with the strategic Uralvagonzavod in Russia to expand economic and scientific-technical ties and to modernize the enterprises.

• Following Putin's decree for the annexation of the Zaporizhzhia NPP, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, by Rosatom through the newly created joint-stock company Zaporizhzhia NPP Operating Organization.
• Rostech is interested in defense prowess and those with "specialized competencies," as well as the ability of certain civilian productions to be reformatted to create equipment for the military.
• In addition, the Russian Ministry of Construction has prepared a master plan for the complete reconstruction of Mariupol in three years, which includes, in particular, the construction of more than 1 million square meters of social infrastructure, a spokesman for the ministry said in early August. In the city devastated by Russian bombing, the Russians promise to rebuild the airport, modernize the railway station, as well as create a transport hub, including a car and rail station and a new sea port for passengers.

The commission to the government in Moscow, working behind closed doors, is headed by Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnulin, and the Minister of Construction and Housing and Communal Services Irek Faizulin is his deputy in this body. There were also representatives of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the data on the inclusion of the Ministry of Economic Development are contradictory.

Draft amendments to the Civil Code have been submitted to parliament, according to which the Federal Tax Service must enter information on local legal entities and entrepreneurs in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities by December 31, 2022, based on Ukrainian registers. The bill suggests that individual entrepreneurs will be able to work without re-registration until June 30, 2023.

Russian entrepreneurs say that, first of all, they need information about the condition of the objects, whether they have been demined, whether they have been cleared of unexploded ammunition, where to find employees and specialists, what are the connections with electricity supply, gas supply, communications. It is not clear where management documentation and accounting data will be found if they are destroyed.

In addition, it is not clear how the transfer will be legally shaped. Under the current legislation, the company's creditors must first make a general decision to transfer it to external management, then apply to an arbitration court for bankruptcy. Before the court decision on this, there is a monitoring procedure lasting half a year.

Russia will not wait that long at all and in a state of martial law will most likely accelerate the seizure of local "abandoned" businesses in the name of returning to normal life for thousands of citizens. The martial law allows laws and regulations to be passed for temporary restrictions on economic and financial activities, which lawyers interpret as the right to transfer enterprises under the control of new owners. The problem is what happens when martial law is lifted and whether there will be an appeal against the legitimacy of the decisions taken at the time.

Prigozhin: Let's ban YouTube access to Russia

The head of the private military company Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, called on Russia's Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov to block YouTube's access to the country and to declare the platform's owner, Google Corporation, an "undesirable organization" (a term in Russian law referring to foreign organizations, whose activity may pose a threat to the foundations of the constitutional order of the Russian Federation, the country's defense capability or its security).

This was reported by the press service of Prigozhin's Concord Corporation, quoted by the Russian version of "Free Europe".

The businessman claims that YouTube is "overrun with fakes discrediting the Russian army, spreading deliberately false information about the actions of the Russian armed forces, state bodies and administration, as well as patriotic forces."

According to him, the platform is a tool of the "information war" that the US is allegedly waging against Russia, and is conducting a "consistent policy of censoring Russian channels." According to Prigozhin, YouTube publishes "Russophobic content, calls for the overthrow of power in the Russian Federation and destructive materials."

He proposed that Google be declared an "undesirable organization" because it "disseminates information aimed at creating a threat to the defense capability of the country and the security of the state."

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, access to a number of social networks in Russia has been blocked, including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The owner of the latter two of these social networks, Meta Corporation, has been criticized for refusing to censor content that calls for resistance to the Russian invasion.

YouTube has blocked a number of Russian channels since the start of the war. Recently, in compliance with US sanctions, the profile of the Federation Council was blocked. At the same time, representatives of the Russian authorities are skeptical about the possibility of blocking the popular platform.

After blocking the account of the Federation Council, the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation announced that it has no plans to block access to YouTube for the country.

British intelligence: The Russian mobilized reservists sent to the front are poorly equipped

The UK Ministry of Defense said on Monday in its latest intelligence report on the conflict in Ukraine that since mid-October Russia has deployed several thousand newly mobilized reservists to the front line, who are mostly ill-equipped, worrying many Russian officers.

The ministry said Russian reservists are often equipped with weapons such as outdated Kalashnikov assault rifles (AKMs), which were first introduced into service as far back as 1959. Many of them are likely in barely usable condition after poor storage.

It is noted that this means that "Russian logisticians will have to deliver two, not one, types of small arms ammunition to front-line positions."

"This is likely to further complicate Russia's already strained logistics systems," the British Ministry of Defense concluded.

The old AKMs fire 7.62mm caliber ammunition, while Russia's regular combat units are primarily armed with 5.45mm AK-74M or AK-12 rifles.

Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 31 October 2022

Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/2ZQnn5d7fS

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— Ministry of Defence ???????? (@DefenceHQ) October 31, 2022

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