Kharkiv bomb, southern strikes and Vuhledar's fall: 2 October 2024
A look back at a day of Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and the aftermath of the withdrawal from a Donetsk Oblast town.
What did the war look like on 2 October 2024? It combined fresh strikes on a major city in the north-east with the consequences of a retreat in the east.
On 2 October 2024, a Russian guided bomb hit an apartment building in Kharkiv, injuring at least ten people.
Southern strikes the day before
The previous day, 1 October 2024, Russian strikes on Kherson and Zaporizhzhia killed seven people and injured 12 others.
Vuhledar
Also on 1 October 2024, Russian forces captured the town of Vuhledar in Donetsk Oblast after Ukrainian forces retreated from it. Vuhledar had already been a focus of fighting. A first major Russian effort to take it came in the early months of 2023, after an advance through the surrounding area the year before. Ukrainian commanders described those clashes as the largest tank battle of the war up to that point. That assault failed, with heavy Russian losses and the dismissal of the commander who led it, Rustam Muradov. Smaller attempts to advance near the city, also unsuccessful, continued through 2023 and the first half of 2024.
Taken together, the reports from 1 and 2 October 2024 showed pressure on Ukrainian territory along several fronts: a bombing of residential housing in Kharkiv, attacks on two southern cities, and the loss of a town that had resisted Russian assaults for well over a year.
