• Crimea terror. At least 18 people were killed and 40 more injured in an explosion and shooting on Oct. 17 at a polytechnic college in Kerch, a city of 146,000 people in Crimea, the Ukrainian territory Russia occupied in 2014. A student at the school is suspected of carrying out the attack and then committing suicide.
• Deadly attacks. Russian-led forces opened fire on the positions of the Joint Forces in eastern Ukraine 19 times over the previous 24 hours, according to the Oct. 17 morning report by the Joint Forces HQ . Two Ukrainian soldiers were killed in action and another one was wounded, the military said.
• Blocking moves. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has reported new cases of Russian-led forces obstructing the activity of observers of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine.
• Crime boss. Vitaly Nakhlupin, the deputy head of the so-called “leader” of Russian-occupied Crimea Sergey Aksyonov and the ex-chairman of the committee on economic, fiscal and tax policies, has been detained in Moscow on charges of corruption.
• Sale fail. The bank auction for Gulliver, a large shopping mall and office complex in central Kyiv, did not proceed as scheduled on Oct. 16 because the 10 interested buyers did not meet requirements set by the sellers.
• Green investment. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or EBRD, plans to finance an ambitious bioenergy program in Ukraine next year, EBRD officials said in Kyiv on Oct. 16.
• Air crash. One of the pilots of a Su-27UB fighter aircraft that crashed near the the village of Ulaniv in Vinnytsia Oblast on Oct. 16 was a U.S. serviceman from the Air National Guard, the U.S. Air Force has confirmed.
