April 28, 2023 - Russia-Ukraine news

Russia launched a barrage of long-range cruise missiles at Ukraine in the early hours of Friday morning, according to Ukrainian officials. 

At around 4 a.m. local time (9 p.m. ET), 23 missiles were launched from Russian aircraft in the Caspian Sea area, along with two drones, according to the Ukrainian Air Force. Twenty-one of the missiles were intercepted by Ukrainian air defenses, it said. 

But missiles did hit the central Ukrainian cities of Uman, in the Cherkasy region south of Kyiv, and Dnipro.

Uman: Officials say the death toll in Uman stands at 20, including three children. At least 18 people have been wounded. 

According to Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Ihor Klymenko, there were 46 apartments inside one of the buildings that were hit, of which 27 were completely destroyed. He said it may take a day to clear all the rubble.

Emergency workers at the site "have almost finished clearing the ground floor [of the building]" and will continue combing the building, according to Yulia Norovkova, a press officer for the Cherkasy region state emergency service. 

CNN also spoke to a local woman, Liuda, whose friend lived on the eighth floor. When she heard the building had been hit, Liuda rushed there to find that her friend had survived, but her friend’s husband had been hospitalized and their two daughters, aged 7 and 13, were still missing. 

Some context: The strike – by a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile – is thought to have caused the highest number of civilian casualties in a single incident since a missile struck an apartment block in Dnipro in January.

Dnipro: Ukrainian authorities have given more details about a 31-year-old woman who died, along with her 2-year-old child, after a Russian missile strike on the city of Dnipro on Friday morning.

Serhii Lysak, governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region, said the woman had moved to her parents' house due to the war.

The woman’s parents are both hospitalized, Lysak said.  

CNN's Nic Robertson and Julia Kesaieva contributed to this post.

The presidents of the Czech Republic and Slovakia visited Ukraine on Friday, their first joint visit abroad, Slovakian President Zuzana Čaputová said in a tweet on Friday.

Čaputová said the visit is intended to bring "a message of friendship, solidarity & support," noting that the three countries "share parts of common history."

Czech Republic President Petr Pavel also confirmed the visit on Twitter, saying that he and Čaputová "both value freedom and justice."

The Czech president shared a picture of himself shaking hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and said he would push for accession talks with the European Union to start for Ukraine by the end of the year.

He said EU and NATO membership for Ukraine "is not a question of if, but when."

The Czech president also tweeted pictures of him visiting Bucha, the Kyiv suburb that was under Russian occupation for over a month last year and has since become synonymous with Russian atrocities.

Some background on Pavel: He won the Czech Republic’s presidential election in January and took office in March of this year, after a campaign featuring strong backing for NATO and the European Union and support for aid to Ukraine.

A former army chief, Pavel became chairman of NATO’s military committee for three years before retiring in 2018. 

The visit comes after recent tensions between Ukraine and several eastern European states. Slovakia temporarily suspended grain imports from Ukraine earlier this month, following similar moves by Poland and Hungary. Farmers in countries neighboring Ukraine have protested the effects of increased imports of Ukrainian grain in their grain prices, the European Commission said in a statement in March.

A high-rise building with a well-known mural depicting a smiling family has been destroyed in the beleaguered Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in recent days, according to video geolocated by CNN. 

The footage on Telegram shows an explosion at night and then smoke billowing out of the structure.

While the building with a mural of a woman and baby wearing crowns made of leaves appears to have been decimated, the mural with a man and a boy holding a toy airplane remains.

Here's what it looked like last year:

President Vladimir Putin signed a decree Thursday that allows the deportation of Ukrainian citizens from the territories declared annexed by Russia if they are considered a "national security threat."

According to the decree published online, residents from the annexed territories in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson who have not taken Russian citizenship will be recognized as foreigners. They could be expelled from Russia if they pose a threat to national security, the decree said, including where residents are allegedly advocating for "a violent change in the constitutional order of the Russian Federation, planning or financing terrorist attacks or extremist crimes."

Some background: In September 2022, Putin announced Russia would seize of nearly a fifth of Ukraine — which is illegal under international law — in the four regions, some of which are not even under full Russian control. It followed so-called referendums in the regions that were universally dismissed as "shams" by Ukraine and Western nations.

The decree also establishes that Ukrainians living in such areas who do not carry a Russian passport would have to apply for a residence permit. They will have to undergo fingerprint registration and provide a package of documents translated into Russian.

Ukrainian officials have repeatedly said that people living in Russian-occupied areas are being denied services when they don’t hold Russian documents.

Responding to the latest decree, Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said, "The occupier has seized a part of foreign territory, killed a certain number of civilians, and is forcibly throwing others out of their homes by the thousands. Only because they do not want to become 'citizens of the country-murderer'..." 

Remember: In March, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin and a Russian official for an alleged scheme to deport Ukrainian children to Russia.

Seventeen people have been confirmed dead in the city of Uman following the Russian missile strike early Friday, officials have said.

A CNN team at the site of the attack saw bodies carried out of a decimated residential building. 

Local officials told the CNN crew that three children were among the dead. Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky earlier said on Twitter that two children killed in Uman “can’t be identified” and the fate of their parents was unknown. 

The death toll from Russia’s cruise missile and drone strikes overnight is now 19, according to CNN’s reporting. The other two casualties were a woman and her two-year-old child in Dnipro. 

The death toll from Russia's strikes across Ukraine on Friday morning has risen to 16 after two more bodies were found in Uman, with the total of those killed in the city now standing at 14, with two 10-year-old children among the dead.

Two other deaths were reported earlier in the city of Dnipro - a 31-year-old woman and her 2-year-old child.

Fragments from a missile intercepted over the Kyiv region hit a multi-story residential building and injured two people, including a 13-year-old girl, the Kyiv region police chief Andrii Nebytov said.

Missiles and drones were also shot down over the capital Kyiv, in what authorities called the first missile attack on the Ukrainian capital in 51 days.

Here are the latest developments:

Ukraine’s armed forces are finishing their preparations for a counteroffensive against Russian troops, defense minister Oleksii Reznikov has said.

Asked whether Ukraine had received the weapons promised by its international allies in order to launch a counteroffensive, Reznikov said his country had received Leopard 2 and Challenger tanks and was expecting Leopard 1 tanks “a little later.” He said US-made Abrams tanks would not arrive in time to participate in the counteroffensive.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday that Ukraine’s foreign allies had delivered more than 98% of the combat vehicles promised to Kyiv.

Some background: Ukraine has made extraordinary efforts to conceal the start of its strategically vital counteroffensive, and deputy defense minister Hanna Maliar stated last week that the counteroffensive would not be announced.

The death toll from Russia's strikes across Ukraine on Friday morning has risen to 16 after two more bodies were found in Uman, with the total of those killed in the city now standing at 14.

Two other deaths were reported earlier in the city of Dnipro.

Children among the dead: Cruise missiles were launched at Ukrainian cities in the early hours of Friday morning.

In Dnipro, a 31-year-old woman and her 2-year-old child died, according to Dnipropetrovsk Regional Prosecutor's Office in a post on Telegram. Two 10-year-old children are among the dead in Uman, Ihor Taburets, the head of the Cherkasy region, said.

Missiles and drones were also shot down over the capital Kyiv, in what authorities called the first missile attack on the Ukrainian capital in 51 days.

Fragments from a missile intercepted over the Kyiv region hit a multi-story residential building and injured two people, including a 13-year-old girl, the Kyiv region police chief Andrii Nebytov said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered museums to be built which are dedicated to commemorating the events of the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin said Friday.

The museums, which will be built across the country, will showcase “the events of the special military operation and the heroic deeds of its participants,” according to a Kremlin statement.

Putin has set a deadline of the end of the year for the heads of the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Education and Science, and the Ministry of Education to report on the progress of implementing the galleries which are to be handled by regional and municipal authorities. The Ministry of Defense has also been directed to identify artifacts suitable for display in these museums.

Controlling the narrative: On February 24 2022, Russia launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine and began Europe’s biggest land war since 1945 -- and the Kremlin has been working hard to control the narrative.

Draconian new censorship laws target any media still operating outside the controls of the Kremlin and most independent journalists have left the country.

Meanwhile, a digital Iron Curtain has been reinforced, shutting Russians off from Western news and social media sites, and authorities have rounded up thousands in a crackdown on anti-war protests.