the united states and around the world. welcome to cnn newsroom. the final stretch. 16 days to go until the u.s. elections, the candidates are pulling out the stops and pulling in high-profile support. xi jinping secures an unprecedented third term, cementing his iron grip over china s future. we re live in beijing and taipei with the latest. and ukraine s power grid under attack with frigid winter just around the corner. russia takes aim at critical infrastructure. a live report from kyiv is just ahead. the u.s. is just over two weeks away from the tightly contested and deeply consequential midterm elections. at stake this november, control of congress. and by extension, the president s political agenda. joe biden s democratic party currently holds 220 seats in the house, and to keep its majority, it must hold on to 218 of them. right now, though, republicans have a slight lead in the polls with 18 seats still up for grabs. in the senate, 35 seats are in play. cnn
Transformers, they are less easy to find, harder to hold in inventory, and russia has sort of a war of attrition against them. if the russians can knock out more than the ukrainians can replace, then obviously the power system becomes more and more degraded. that s a concern. president zelenskyy s assessment of taking down a lot of the incoming cruise missiles and drones is accurate, but it s more accurate for cities like kyiv, lviv, and odesa. the major cities. yesterday, for example, missiles, all the missiles that were incoming to kyiv, were shot down. all the missiles that were incoming to lviv yesterday, seven were shot down by ukraine s air force. most of the missiles incoming to odesa yesterday were shot down, though at least one got through and a power plant damaged. some people suffered shortages of electricity in the odesa region. but what the russians are also doing is not only focusing on the easy to hit parts of the
Objective. huge problems with the convoy. logistical, supplies. some people he learned from them he shifted his tactic. the way he had done in previous conflicts and what he has started to do in an ever-increasing manner is target the urban centers, target the residential areas. if you cause chaos among the people, if you can isolate them, then you re already well towards achieving your goal. that s what people here are concerned about. we don t know if the southern part of the city s going to be cut off. last night was surprisingly quiet. as the sun falls, everyone expected there to be shelling. we didn t see that last night. no one knows what s going to come next. the same is true across the whole country. i drove here from lviv yesterday. every single town and village along ways in the same position. they are bracing but they don t know when or where that attack might come from. it s that uncertainty which is so difficult. we ve seen him consolidate, putin consolidates and forces in
Scene here but we are seeing a one car drive by right now but really the only people that you will see here at this time of night, military out at about are the only people allowed to be ouch. take a listen to the sirens. the sound is a faint of course for many of the people who are inside listening into this. they will hear this through closed doors have their shutters drawn their blinds drawn listening to the sound of the siren in the utter silence of the rest of the city as for yet another night ordinary sirens here in lviv yesterday s attack still creating threats we have seen since the beginning of the war. these sirens have stopped. that means most people should have heard them by now. later on will likely hear sirens
It s humiliating. putin is thin skinned. we know that. this is a campaign that is important. biden made the comment at the time when the russian military is not doing very well. do you have that intersection where they try to say, well, we re just looking for donetsk. we re not looking for all of ukraine. nobody will believe that. i mean, do you buy that? i mean, we had a strike on lviv yesterday, which seemed to say that no, we re not doing that. and yet it could be a way for putin to begin to make the case to the russian public that the objective has been achieved and we have won. because if you look at the original reason for going in, it was all protecting the russian speakers in the eastern donetsk region. so i think, you know, you can make the argument that it s at least preparing the ground to say that s what we wanted to do. we protected our round. we have done it. but that strike on lviv, i