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Russian forces carried out a night air strike on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, killing one woman and injuring three people. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram the same day that the attack hit a metro station on the left bank, damaged a 25-storey residential building, and also damaged several non-residential buildings and a medical facility. Reuters reporters heard explosions in Kyiv.

Zelensky said the same day that the United States, after a brief pause, had resumed sharing with Ukraine key intelligence used to defend against Russian missile attacks, calling it crucial for early warning of Russian high-speed missiles fired in waves. He also said he had recently spoken by phone with U.S. peace envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. The two visited Kyiv earlier this month, as the United States is mediating to end the war that began with Russia's invasion in 2022.

Synthetic biology pharmaceutical company Antheia announced that it has received a conditional commitment for a long-term loan of up to $80 million from the U.S. Department of War Office of Strategic Capital (OSC), to support its manufacturing strategy for producing critical pharmaceutical starting materials and active pharmaceutical ingredients domestically in the United States. According to Antheia's announcement, approximately 90% of key starting materials (KSMs) and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) in the United States are import-dependent, and this financing will help it relocate production of critical materials back onshore. The announcement also noted that the commitment is a conditional commitment, and Antheia must still satisfy a number of financial, legal, technical and due diligence requirements before final closing. Antheia had previously received $32 million in non-dilutive federal financing.

U.S. President Trump posted on Truth Social local time on the 18th, saying he is mediating peace between Russia and Ukraine and has "made major progress"; at the same time he aimed his criticism at Ukrainian President Zelensky, saying he "doesn't care" and "doesn't want to end this war, and probably never did."

Trump defended shelving new sanctions on Russia, saying he does not want to "foolishly" push Russia away from the negotiating table. He criticized the Ukrainian military for striking Russian diesel refineries, saying this severely hurts the global diesel market, including that of the United States; he also praised Russia for supplying diesel to the world at low prices. According to him, Moscow has agreed to supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel, another 500,000 tons in November, and then another 1 million tons.

Zelensky spoke by phone the same day with U.S. special envoy Witkoff and Kushner, saying that "a lot depends" on the U.S. position, and that Ukraine is willing to promote peace "constructively" and "honestly." He told NBC that if Washington publicly sides with Russia it would be a "historic mistake," and expressed hope that Trump will "change his decision"; at the same time he thanked the U.S. for resuming intelligence sharing with Ukraine.

CoinGecko market data shows Bitcoin was quoted at $81,970 on Sunday morning, up about 0.93% in 24 hours, recovering the $81,000 level it lost in the early hours of today. Ethereum also rebounded to $2,403, up about 0.43% in 24 hours. Bitcoin had previously fallen below $81,000 at one point, approaching the densely populated long liquidation zone.

Anthropic announced on Sunday that it will contribute 5% of the company's shares to the newly established Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a commitment subject to shareholder approval; each time the company's valuation grows by 50%, the board of directors may, at its discretion, add a further 2% of shares, with the baseline valuation not yet disclosed. The fund is registered as a limited liability company wholly owned by the company; its funds may be used to make donations to nonprofit organizations or to distribute directly to specific groups of people, and its shareholdings may not be used for lobbying or political contributions. Together with the 80% of their shareholdings that the founders previously pledged to donate, the shares Anthropic devotes to public benefit total approximately 20%.

Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of Lithuania's National Crisis Management Center, said on the 18th that at about 2 a.m. on the 18th (7 a.m. Beijing time), an attempted arson occurred at a SpaceX Starlink station on the outskirts of the capital Vilnius, and the suspects are still being pursued. The fire was quickly extinguished, causing only minor property damage, and operations were not affected. Vitkauskas said this was not an ordinary arson but a sabotage operation. He linked this incident to recent arson cases at Starlink sites in Bulgaria and Poland: Bulgarian authorities said that on October 10 multiple Starlink antennas in the country were set on fire; a September fire at a Starlink facility in Poland damaged the power system and backup generators, and Poland characterized it as sabotage and blamed Russia, detaining four suspects. Reuters wrote that the Ukrainian military makes extensive use of Starlink terminals for battlefield communications, and many drones are equipped with Starlink receivers as part of their guidance systems; Vitkauskas said "the target is Ukraine." Moscow says such accusations are unfounded.

AI model routing company TrustedRouter has closed a $6 million seed round led by Sierra Ventures, according to Semafor. The company publicly launched about six weeks ago; its service allows developers and enterprises to switch between different AI models based on factors such as cost and privacy; for some open-weight models it provides end-to-end encryption and verifiable confidential computing, and is designed so that even the company itself and the data centers cannot read users' prompts and outputs. The company also plans to launch a marketplace called the "New York Token Exchange" that lets model providers and hosting providers bid to handle requests, pricing AI inference tokens as a commodity.

During the Saturday Wall Street closure, perpetual contracts on chip stocks on Binance and Hyperliquid were forcibly liquidated for nearly $52 million within 10 minutes, of which about $38 million came from long bets. According to a CoinDesk report, the sell-off began on Binance: a review by David Jeong, CEO of trading firm Tread.fi, shows that the first large SanDisk and Micron sell orders appeared at 21:21:59 UTC, and about one second later spread to Hyperliquid, where about 10 addresses opened short positions on six chip-related contracts within 1.8 seconds. The hardest hit was the triple-leveraged long chip-stock SOXL fund contract (about $12.7 million), with SanDisk and SK Hynix contracts at about $10.8 million each. Because the contracts trade 24 hours while U.S. stocks are closed, weekend prices are driven entirely by crypto traders playing against each other; the U.S. market open on Monday will provide a benchmark, at which point it will be possible to see how far Saturday's prices deviated.

Latvia plans to allow residents to pay personal taxes in cryptocurrency as early as 2027. According to CoinDesk, Prime Minister's adviser Didzis Dejus said at the UN:BLOCK fintech conference in Riga that the Ministry of Finance has agreed to the plan, but the technical integration with payment service providers has not yet been completed; asked whether it could be implemented during this government's term, he said, "I believe it will happen next year." On Oct. 15, the Latvian parliament already passed a crypto tax reform: instead of taxing each transaction, tax will be levied when withdrawals from an investment account exceed the amount deposited, and a one-time declaration mechanism was introduced — crypto holders can pay back historical taxes at 10% of the market value of their assets at the end of 2026, with the declaration period from April 1 to May 31, 2027, and the tax payment deadline of July 23. The plan continues the roadmap for crypto tax payments and asset tokenization announced in May 2025; Dejus said Latvia is "not afraid to be the fastest country."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" on the 18th that the Ukrainian military's use of the Starlink system to guide short-range and battlefield drones is still restricted, "this is the message sent by the U.S. government," and that the purpose is to limit the flight speed of Ukrainian drones; the Trump administration denies having ordered restrictions on the service. Zelensky also criticized the Trump administration for exempting new sanctions on Russia and allowing Russian diesel imports, calling this "more support for Russian aggression"; he also said the U.S. side had suspended intelligence sharing with Ukraine for three days during a Russian ballistic missile attack, and that it has since been restored. U.S.-Ukraine relations are currently strained: Trump said last week that Ukraine's attacks on Russian oil refining facilities were "disgraceful," and said that Russia and Ukraine had agreed a week earlier to stop attacking each other's energy facilities, but neither side has acknowledged the existence of such an agreement; the Ukrainian side briefly paused its attacks and then resumed them, while the Russian side has never stopped striking Ukraine's energy facilities. Zelensky wrote on X on the 18th that since the U.S. announced the energy ceasefire a week ago, Russia has "deliberately" attacked Ukraine's energy and oil and gas sectors 76 times; according to Ukrainian figures, in the 24 hours up to the morning of the 18th, Russian attacks killed 11 people and injured nearly 50 in multiple places in Ukraine, including a "large-scale" attack on energy facilities in Odesa.

Bitcoin fell below the $81,000 mark today. According to CoinGecko data, it was trading at about $80,900 as of press time, down about 0.7% in 24 hours. Ethereum was at about $2,351, down about 2.6% in 24 hours.

Bitcoin's current price has approached the dense long liquidation level of about $80,862 cited by Stocktwits based on CoinGlass data. Liquidation data shows that in the 24 hours from October 17 to 18, total liquidations across the network were about $190 million, of which longs accounted for about 77%. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index stood at 53, versus 55 previously, remaining neutral.

Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced the "Prohibiting Corrupt Russian Oil Transactions Act" on the 16th, seeking to block the Trump administration's diesel import arrangement with Russia.

The bill sets out three measures: prohibiting the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) from investing in Russia's energy sector; revoking the general import license already issued by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and barring the issuance of similar licenses in the future; and requiring the government to impose sanctions on Russian energy.

In a committee press release, Meeks said the deal would not lower living costs for the American people and would only send millions of dollars to Putin, letting him "continue massacring Ukrainian civilians with impunity."

The deal stems from the temporary general license issued by the US Treasury after Trump's October 9 phone call with Putin, allowing Russian diesel into the United States and global markets. The bill currently has 17 co-sponsors, all Democrats except Republican Representative Don Bacon.

U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs saw $228.6 million in net outflows this week, following $681.1 million in outflows the prior week, for a two-week total of about $910 million. According to Decrypt, three of the five trading days this week saw net outflows, with Wednesday's $261.4 million in redemptions the largest single day of the week and Friday seeing another $82.4 million in single-day outflows. Month-to-date in October, cumulative net outflows are about $615 million, but cumulative net inflows since launch in January 2024 remain at $57.3 billion.

This week's selling coincided with higher-than-expected inflation data: September CPI rose 3.7% year-over-year, above the 3.6% expectation, and PPI was also above expectations, prompting the market to renew bets on Federal Reserve rate hikes. Bitcoin briefly fell below $80,000 on Thursday, and nearly $950 million in leveraged positions were liquidated within 24 hours, about 90% of them longs, according to CoinGlass data; a Nexo analyst said the coin price has fallen below the average cost basis of about $82,300 for ETF holders.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a social media post on Sunday that Russian overnight strikes on residential buildings in multiple regions of Ukraine had killed 2 people and injured 12, including 2 children. Substations in the Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi and Odesa regions were hit, leaving tens of thousands of households without power; an agricultural enterprise in the Volyn region was also hit in the morning.

He said that over the past week Russian forces had fired nearly 2,700 attack drones, 1,700 aerial bombs and 66 missiles at Ukraine, most of them ballistic missiles. Since the U.S. side announced an "energy ceasefire" a week ago, Russia has carried out 76 deliberate strikes on Ukraine's energy and oil and gas facilities.

Enterprise AI agent infrastructure company AIsa announced the completion of a seed extension round, with stablecoin issuer Tether and HIVEN joining as strategic investors. According to a Cointelegraph report, the company's cumulative funding after this round exceeds $9 million; previous investors include Alibaba, Tribe Capital, Sumitomo Corporation, Draper Associates, and Saison Capital, among others. Founder and CEO Jordan Liu said in a statement on the 17th that the company is building a "trusted resource and transaction network for enterprise AI agents," enabling AI agents to discover, acquire, and pay for resources such as data, models, and APIs on a global scale, while allowing enterprises to retain control over permissions, spending, and transactions.

According to TASS, Kremlin spokesman Peskov said on the 18th that Russia will continue to carry out "systematic, large-scale" strikes against Ukraine, with the aim of weakening Ukraine's "offensive potential." Peskov also said that signs of "some final death throes" have appeared in the Kyiv regime, "but this cannot change the course of events." This statement was made after large-scale Ukrainian drone attacks on St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast from late night on the 17th to the early morning of the 18th; the Russian side said it shot down 1,015 Ukrainian drones overnight. Ukrainian President Zelensky accused Russian forces of attacking residential buildings and striking substations in multiple locations, causing tens of thousands of households to lose power.

[Kyiv] The Kyiv Independent reported on October 18, citing officials across Ukraine, that Russian attacks across Ukraine over the past day had killed at least 10 civilians and injured 73. On the morning of the 18th, Russian drones attacked three western oblasts: an industrial facility caught fire in Manevychi, Volyn Oblast, the second attack there in three days (an earlier attack on the 16th killed 1 and injured 8); an energy facility was hit in Ternopil Oblast, cutting power to some users; and civilian facilities in Rivne Oblast were hit in a large-scale drone attack and caught fire. Ukraine's Air Force reported that Russia launched 1 Iskander-M missile and 180 Shahed-series drones (including 26 jet-powered ones), supported by loitering munitions and decoy drones; Ukrainian air defenses shot down or suppressed 152 (including 16 jet-powered ones); Russian weapons struck 20 locations, with 4 other sites reporting fallen debris. In addition, damage to critical infrastructure in Vinnytsia Oblast triggered emergency power outages; a residential building in Zaporizhzhia was hit on the evening of the 17th, killing a 27-year-old woman; and drones struck a residential area in Poltava, killing 1 and injuring 2 and damaging 4 houses.

Ukrainian President Zelensky said on Saturday that the United States is working to arrange a trilateral meeting between him, US President Trump and Russian President Putin, with possible locations including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, a European country, or the United States during the December G20 summit, but neither Russia nor the United States has yet confirmed it. He also said the US side has signaled that a US-Ukraine meeting may take place next week; Ukraine's chief negotiator Umerov met with US presidential envoy Kushner on Friday. Zelensky also said Ukraine is willing to take part in peace talks in any location and in any format.

A Ukrainian drone attack on St Petersburg and the Leningrad region has killed 1 person and injured 15, according to figures from Russian local authorities. St Petersburg Governor Beglov said the St Petersburg oil terminal, an oil depot and industrial warehouses caught fire; Russian e-commerce company Ozon said its logistics center caught fire, and internet company VK said its data center was hit by drones but that services were operating normally. The Russian Defense Ministry said it downed 1,015 Ukrainian drones overnight; Kremlin spokesman Peskov said Russia will give a "systematic, large-scale" response to the Ukrainian attacks.

According to CNN, U.S. President Trump has waived sanctions on Russian diesel imports and on Friday (October 16) invoked waiver authority to exempt Russia from a package of economic penalties authorized by the U.S. Congress, a move that has drawn criticism even from within the Republican Party. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Zelensky said on Saturday that the U.S. side has restricted the Ukrainian military's use of the Starlink system to guide drones, saying the connection is cut off once speeds exceed 161 kilometers per hour; the Trump administration denies restricting the service.

Polish fighter jets scrambled on Sunday to protect the country's airspace from the spillover of Russian air strikes on Ukraine; Poland's armed forces said on X that the action was precautionary. Airports in the eastern city of Lublin and southeastern Rzeszow briefly suspended flights to allow military aircraft to operate, and later resumed operations. Poland had also said it was checking an incident in which an unidentified object may have violated its airspace.

[Kyiv] Ukrainian President Zelensky said on Sunday that since US President Trump announced a ceasefire on energy infrastructure a week ago, Russia has launched 76 "deliberate attacks" on Ukraine's energy, oil and gas facilities. He said the latest round of strikes hit substations in four regions: Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi and Odesa.

[St. Petersburg] Ukrainian drones launched a large-scale air strike on the Russian city of St. Petersburg in the early hours of October 18. According to Ukrainian monitoring channels, the attack began at 2:50 a.m. local time (7:50 a.m. Beijing time). Russian media reported that a St. Petersburg oil depot, a substation and multiple facilities were hit and caught fire, with huge explosions heard at the scene; the St. Petersburg oil depot, with an annual throughput of about 12.5 million tons, is a key hub for Russia's refined oil exports. Russian internet giant VK confirmed that its data center in Leningrad Oblast was hit by a drone attack, but said services were operating as usual. Leningrad Oblast Governor Drozdenko said air defense systems shot down over a hundred drones and that power outages occurred in some areas; Pulkovo Airport temporarily restricted flight takeoffs and landings. According to The Sun, Ukrainian President Zelensky had called on U.S. President Trump before the attack to increase pressure on Russia rather than on Ukraine.

Russian Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov reported to Putin on October 16 that Russian forces have since September 1 captured 92 settlements and more than 1,800 square kilometers of land, including in the Dobropillia direction. Ukrainian General Staff spokesperson Kovalyov on October 17 dismissed the claim as an "illusion," saying Dobropillia remains under Ukrainian control and that since the start of autumn the Ukrainian military has retaken more territory than Russian forces have occupied. ISW assesses that over the same period Russian forces actually suffered a net loss of 122 square kilometers, and Reuters said it could not independently verify the claims of either side.

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh said on Friday during a fireside chat with Managing Director Georgieva on the sidelines of the IMF annual meetings that the Fed "will ensure price stability," but declined to prejudge the decision of the Oct. 27–28 policy meeting, saying he does "not believe in telegraphing intentions for future meetings in advance." Warsh said the September 25-basis-point rate hike to about 3.9% "removed some accommodation." U.S. inflation remains stubborn: September PPI rose 1.3% month-on-month, and August CPI was 3.4%. He also called AI investment "the most important upside force in the global economy," which will force central banks to change how they set interest rates. Warsh succeeded Powell on May 22 this year to become the 17th Fed Chair.

DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash-1017 on October 17, a minor-version update to V4.1 Flash that focuses on being faster, lighter and cheaper. The new model has 552B total parameters (8B input activation, 16B output activation), a 1-million-token context window, and its weights are open-sourced on Hugging Face under the MIT license. The company says the new version delivers across-the-board improvements on reasoning, coding and agentic tasks, with a DeepSWE v1.1 score of 77.0, up from 74.2 for the previous generation; API pricing remains unchanged at $0.15/$0.60 per million tokens, and calls still go through the deepseek-flash alias. DeepSeek also launched Search and Fetch APIs in the same period, charging $0.75 per thousand successful requests.