What happened in brief: 3 October

The Russian State Duma (lower chamber of parliament) ratified the annexation of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”, as well as parts of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that “this process is a logical continuation of the reunification of Russian lands, which started with the return of the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol to Russia in 2014.”

Three drafted men died at a Russian army training centre located in the settlement of Poroshino, Yekaterinburg region. “One of the mobilised men died from a heart attack, another one committed suicide. The third one was discharged and sent home, where he died from cirrhosis of the liver,” Russian State Duma MP Maxim Ivanov said. These deaths are not isolated cases: another man is reported to have died in his sleep at a command school in Novosibirsk, and another mobilised soldier died at an assembly point in the Tyumen region.

Russian troops struck a hospital in the Kupyansk district of Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, governor Oleg Synegubov said. An anaesthesiologist was killed in the attack, and a nurse was injured.

A 17-year-old schoolgirl was detained in Russia’s Kazan for attempting to set fire to a draft office using Molotov’s cocktails. The school student said that she wanted to set fire to a draft office as a sign of protest against the war in Ukraine and the mobilisation.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces established control over the settlements of Arkhanhelske and Myrolyubivka in the Kherson region, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said. “The story of the liberation of Lyman in Donetsk region has now become the most popular in the media. But the successes of our soldiers are not limited to Lyman,” the Ukrainian leader stated.