MOSCOW, Oct. 17 -- Russia's Defense Ministry said on Saturday that its forces had struck what it described as Ukraine's largest metallurgical enterprise, then put the plant's output in the past tense. Zaporizhstal, the ministry's statement says in TASS's English rendering, previously produced 1.44 million metric tons of pig iron and over 1.3 million metric tons of rolled steel a year.

The overnight strike also hit, the ministry said, a metals plant in Kryvyi Rih, a transformer factory in Zaporizhzhia, a substation in Zhytomyr and a dry cargo ship it said was carrying military cargo to the port of Odesa. It named ground-based, airborne and sea-launched precision weapons and attack drones. The announcement came days after Donald Trump decl...