In Istanbul, a Grain Corridor and Generators; At Home, Drones, a Refinery Fire and a Town Coming Home

President Volodymyr Zelensky hailed "an important and substantive meeting" with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Istanbul on Saturday, at the end of a week in which Ukraine sought help for the winter ahead while its drones struck deep inside Russia and a small humanitarian breakthrough played out in the occupied south. The two leaders discussed the situation in the Black Sea, where Russia has been attacking ships and Ukrainian ports in what Kyiv describes as an attempted blockade. Zelensky said Erdoğan had agreed to work on a grain corridor, restoring the route opened after a previous Russian blockade was broken in 2022. Erdoğan said attacks against civilian vessels "and actions that further escalate tensions in the Black Sea serve no one's interest", adding, "We cannot accept these attacks under any circumstances, regardless of who carries them out or what justification is offered. We call on all parties to act responsibly on this matter." The meeting came as Washington and Ankara discussed a possible limited ceasefire in the Black Sea to protect commercial shipping, and as European ministers at the G20 meeting in Atlanta demanded that Russia accept such a ceasefire and stop threatening agricultural shipping lanes.

The Istanbul talks were also practical, and the practicalities were about energy. Zelensky posted about "new joint industrial and other economic projects" under a Free Trade Agreement that has come into force, citing "significant potential in energy and infrastructure" after meetings with representatives of Turkish energy companies. Türkiye is expected to increase supplies of generators and other energy equipment as early as next week, as Ukraine faces what it describes as Russia's attempt to break the country with airstrikes over the winter. That warning is grounded in the pattern of recent weeks: Russian ballistic-missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities and the energy system have intensified ahead of winter, including a drone strike that killed 14 people at Dnipro's main railway station on Thursday, and attacks on Kyiv, Chernihiv and Kremenchuk reported this week. Patriot air-defence systems, which Ukrainian officials say are the only effective weapon against Russia's ballistic missiles, remain in short supply — a shortage at the heart of the dispute over the American approval, announced on Friday, of 500 Patriot interceptors whose delivery Kyiv says may be years away.

While the presidents talked in Istanbul, Ukraine's long-range campaign against Russian oil continued. Ukrainian drones again struck the NORSI oil refinery in Kstovo, in Russia's Nizhny Novgorod region, overnight into Sunday. NORSI is Russia's fourth-largest oil refinery and its second-largest gasoline producer, processing around 15 to 17 million metric tons of crude a year, and producing bitumen and the diesel and aviation fuel used to support Russian forces. It lies around 800 kilometres from the Ukrainian border, and Ukraine has targeted it before, including a strike on 26 August that sparked a large fire and forced the suspension of operations. Photographs shared online from the latest attack appeared to show at least seven or eight separate points of fire, far more than the one or two fires usually visible in footage of refinery strikes, although the extent of the damage has not been independently confirmed. The strike also underlined a disagreement with Washington: Ukrainian officials told the Kyiv Independent that Kyiv had never agreed to pause strikes on Russian refineries, after reports that Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner had proposed a 30-day pause. The regional governor, Gleb Nikitin, said more than 100 unmanned aircraft had been shot down overnight over the Nizhny Novgorod region and that, according to preliminary data, no one had been injured.

The week's rare humanitarian success reached its conclusion on Saturday, when evacuated residents of Russian-occupied Oleshky, in the Kherson region, finally reached Ukrainian-controlled territory after a 19-hour journey. Around 2,000 residents of the town, deprived of food and other basic supplies and held by Russian forces who feared Ukrainian attacks, were taken by bus to Russia, flown to Belarus and then moved back into Ukraine, where many broke down in tears as they stepped onto Ukrainian-controlled soil for the first time in years, according to footage published by the Kyiv Independent. A local ceasefire, spurred by Pope Leo XIV according to EA WorldView, had been established the previous week to allow the evacuation, and both Russian and Ukrainian forces appear largely to have abided by its terms since it came into effect on the morning of 27 October, according to the Institute for the Study of War, which also noted limited allegations of violations. The ceasefire was due to remain in effect until late on 1 November. It was, the Institute noted, a remarkably successful humanitarian mission in a war that has produced very few of them — and a local one, with attacks continuing elsewhere throughout.

Those attacks continued at scale. Across 31 October, Russia launched 168 strike drones at Ukraine, of which 122 were neutralised, according to Ukraine's Air Force as reported by UNN, with debris falling on a shopping centre in Kyiv and injuring a 12-year-old girl, and three coal-mining workers injured in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Late on 31 October, a Russian airstrike destroyed the Kramatorsk city executive committee building, and drone attacks continued overnight into 1 November, with explosions reported in Vinnytsia. The war also crossed another European border, according to reports summarised in the 31 October war daily: Romania scrambled four F-16 fighter jets and a military helicopter after drones entered its airspace, and Moldova reported separate incursions. At the G20 foreign ministers' meeting in Atlanta, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was frank about the diplomatic prospects, saying, "I don't know if negotiated peace is achievable in Ukraine, that's what we're trying to find out," and adding, "I don't think anyone here is claiming that we're on the verge of a negotiated settlement." Rubio said he had spoken briefly with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines about a possible interaction between Presidents Trump and Putin at the APEC summit in Shenzhen in mid-November, but stressed that he had held no formal meeting with Lavrov in Atlanta.

What happens next is therefore a set of parallel tracks, none of them settled. Zelensky posted on Saturday that Ukraine was still preparing for technical talks with Russia and the United States in the first half of November, but the Kremlin has pulled back from its initial acceptance of a meeting in Abu Dhabi. The grain corridor work agreed in Istanbul, the generators expected next week, and the question of whether the Black Sea ceasefire discussions produce anything concrete will all be tested against the same winter pressure that has shaped the war for weeks: Russian strikes on energy infrastructure, Ukrainian strikes on the refineries that fund and fuel the Russian war effort, and a negotiation in which, as Rubio put it in Atlanta, no one is claiming a settlement is near. Oleshky showed that a local ceasefire can hold long enough to bring 2,000 people home. Whether anything larger can hold is the question the coming talks will have to answer.

Read the full story at: https://thecurtain.online/story/istanbul-grain-corridor-generators-kstovo-oleshky/

Sources:

- EA WorldView — https://eaworldview.com/2026/11/ukraine-war-zelensky-erdogan/

- OSNT daily brief — https://app.osnt.in/brief/2026-11-01

- Ukraine War Daily, 31 October 2026 — https://medium.com/@boyopopov/ukraine-war-daily-31-october-2026-oleshky-evacuees-return-home-as-drones-enter-romanian-airspace-fc1ae362131d

- Institute for the Study of War, Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, 31 October 2026, via EuropeSays — https://www.europesays.com/russia/83192/

- EuropeSays, reporting Rubio on Lavrov — https://www.europesays.com/3344923/