Ukraine "Preparing for Total War"
ROMANS: Welcome back. Breaking news in the war on ISIS. Fighters from the terrorist group reportedly retreating from an oil refinery in Northern Iraq after surrounding it last month. We are being told Iraqi security forces have now entered the Baiji refinery. That's the largest in Iraq, an important piece of infrastructure. If the Iraqis have regained control of this strategic refinery, it would represent their biggest victory against ISIS to date. We'll continue to follow that this morning, all those developments. Ukraine this morning preparing for, quote, "total war", the words of the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. He tells a German newspaper his country is fighting for European values, but he says Russia does not respect any agreement. Russia denies it has any forces in Eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, the shelling goes on from both sides. CNN's Phil Black is near Ukraine's border with Russia with more.</s>PHL BLACK, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORREPONDENT: Christine, this is Hrabove, in Eastern Ukraine. It is a location where four months ago, Malaysia Airline flight 17 broke up in the skies above, crashed to the Earth, over a wide debris field. It is only now after that length of time that much of the wreckage is being collected and an operation being overseen by Dutch investigators. Look behind me, you can see a twisted of the fuselage, wreckage like this is strewn across this incredibly wide area over the last couple of days. The Dutch investigators overseeing Ukrainian workers have been using cranes to lift up this wreckage on to trucks and get it out of here to a local train station where it will eventually find its way back to the Netherlands. But four months after the crash, it will be a couple of weeks before the experts start to look through it. It is an eternity in terms of an investigation, but important that this is finally happening now. It is getting in just before winter, which is crucial. The snow will be blanketing this area very, very soon. And, of course, there is the situation with the ongoing violence. Back in September, a cease-fire was signed. It saw a drop in the intensity of fighting which allowed the planning of this operation to take place. But as we know over the last week or so, the Ukrainian assessment, the NATO assessment, the concerns of European observers on the ground has been -- that there has been an influx of Russian soldiers, weaponry, into this region. And they feel the coming winter can also be a deadline for an imminent offensive of some kind. A new land grab, if you like, by the separatists, by Russian forces. That is what the Ukrainian government fears and says it is preparing for. That's why the Ukrainian president is talking about total war, the worst-case scenario. Of course, for the moment, the Russia, the separatists -- they deny the presence of those sorts of forces. But it remains to be seen just what happens here in a situation that is incredibly tense, where the fighting continues only a short distance from here, despite the fact that the cease-fire was signed back in September -- Christine.</s>ROMANS: All right. Phil Black for us this morning in Ukraine. A critical vote at the U.N. this morning could lead to criminal prosecutions against the leaders of North Korea. If a U.N. committee approves the solution on Pyongyang's alleged human rights abuses, the entire general assembly will decide in December whether to send the case to the International Criminal Court. That would give North Korea that distinction of becoming the first non-African nation to be referred to the ICC for crimes against humanity. Baseball has been very, very good to Giancarlo Stanton, specifically the Miami Marlins who just gave him the richest contract the game has ever seen ever. Laura Rutledge has the details in the "Bleacher Report", next.