April 25, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news

Our live coverage of the war in Ukraine has moved here.

Kyiv residents walk around the city on Monday.

A nighttime curfew has gone into effect in Kyiv from Monday to Friday this week because of Russia’s “provocative actions,” Oleksandr Pavliuk, the head of the Kyiv Regional Military Administration, said in a Telegram post Monday. 

The curfew will last from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. local time.

“We remind you that during the curfew it is forbidden to be on the street and in other public places, to move by transport or on foot,” Pavliuk said. 

Those involved in the work of critical infrastructure who have a special permit and ID are exempt, he said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov attends a joint news conference following talks with Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan in Moscow, on April 8.

Russia’s foreign minister has insisted his country is striving to lower the risk of nuclear war, but said it was a real and serious danger. 

“It is real, and it cannot be underestimated,” Sergey Lavrov said in an interview aired on Russian television on Monday night.

Referencing a famous joint declaration by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, when the then-leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union agreed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” Lavrov said the “inadmissibility of nuclear war” remained Russia’s “principled position.”

Collapsed agreement: Lavrov also suggested that current fears could be blamed on the West and its refusal to trust Russia. He highlighted the failure to find a successor to a 1980s’ treaty between the US and the Soviet Union that banned medium range nuclear weapons.

That pact collapsed in 2019, but the US had failed to act on Vladimir Putin’s offer of a continued suspension of the deployment of such weapons, Lavrov said.

According to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti, Lavrov told the Russian interviewer that Western countries were encouraging Ukraine to keep fighting – illustrated by Ukraine’s changing demands, he said. 

But he said he still believed the war would end with what RIA Novosti described as the “signing of a diplomatic document.”

While shadowing paramedics in Kharkiv, Ukraine, CNN’s Clarissa Ward and her team were forced to run for safety after getting caught in Russian shelling.

Watch the moment:

Weeks after first occupying the major Ukrainian city of Kherson, Russian troops have taken control of the Kherson City Council, according to two members of the city government.

Kherson Mayor Igor Kolykhaev said on his Facebook that on Monday night, “armed men entered the building of the Kherson City Council, took the keys and replaced our guards with their own.” 

Addressing rumors that the Ukrainian flag that flew over city council had also been taken down, Kolykhaev noted that the flag was still flying over the building when he left.

Yuri Sobolevsky, Kherson regional deputy, described the incident on his Facebook page as a “seizure,” saying it was “unfortunately, quite expected.”  

“Kherson’s city hall was ‘allowed’ to function in a reduced format for a while, but that time seems to be over, too,” Sobolevsky continued

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during his nightly address, on Monday, April 25.

Two days ahead of Russia’s plans to stage a referendum in the occupied Kherson region of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has hailed his people’s refusal to give their backing to Russia’s occupying forces.

“Russia wants to stage a sham ‘referendum’ somewhere on our land? Even if they try, it will be as shameful as everything else that was “created” in Moscow to support the occupation of Ukraine,” he added.

Russia has announced it will hold a vote in the southern region of Kherson — which It has occupied since the opening weeks of the war — on Wednesday, in which people will be asked to approve the “independence” of a new entity called “the Kherson People’s Republic.”

Meanwhile, as the war enters its third month, Zelensky said Russia had fired more than 1,100 missiles at Ukrainian targets, in addition to “countless bombs and artillery.”

The Ukrainian president said 931 settlements in Ukraine had been liberated by Ukrainian forces after temporary occupation by Russian forces. 

In addition, since the start of hostilities some 9,781 Ukrainians had been presented with state awards for their defense of their country, and 142 people had been given a ‘Hero of Ukraine’ award.

“The lessons of history are well known. If you are going to build a millennial Reich, you lose. If you are going to destroy the neighbours — you lose. If you want to restore the old empire, you lose. And if you go against the Ukrainians — you lose,” Zelensky said.

And he struck an upbeat note about Ukraine’s advance towards possible membership of the European Union, which has become a key goal for the Ukrainian leadership.

“We are accelerating our movement to the European Union as much as possible. We have already passed a historic moment, an important stage - with the receipt and answering a special questionnaire, which was provided to each country before they acquired the status of a candidate for EU membership.”

Drone footage shows the destruction in Novotoshkivka, on Monday, April 25.

There is not much left of Novotoshkivka, a small village about 16 miles — or 26 kilometers — southeast of Severodonetsk, new drone video published on Monday by the Russian-backed separatist government Luhansk People’s Republic shows.

CNN has geolocated and confirmed the authenticity of the video.

Novotoshkivka was a very dense but small village in the Luhansk oblast, in eastern Ukraine; it only stretches about half a mile long, and a third of a mile wide. 

Now, fighting in the new war between Russian and Ukrainian forces have left it completely destroyed. Russian backed separatists claim the Ukrainians blew it up when they retreated from their positions in the village.

Serhiy Hayday, the Luhansk regional administrator, confirmed Ukrainian forces there had retreated but claimed on his Facebook page that the Russians had decimated the village through repeated airstrikes.

In remarks made on Ukrainian television Monday, Hayday said that the Russians “keep razing everything to the ground.”

Novotoshkivka had been the site of intense fighting over the last week. At the time, the Ukrainian government and Luhansk regional administration said Russian forces there had been repelled after repeatedly trying to take over the village.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, right, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speak with reporters after returning from their trip to Kyiv, where they spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, on Monday, April 25, in Poland near the Ukraine border.

The White House says Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s declaration the US wants to “see Russia weakened” is in line with the administration’s long-held goal to prevent Moscow from consuming Ukraine.

“What Secretary Austin was talking about is our objective to prevent that from happening,” she went on. “Obviously right now the war is in Ukraine. We’re proud of the Ukrainians’ success, their efforts to fight back, to push back on the Russian military, thanks to their bravery and also to our support.”

“We are also looking to prevent them from expanding their efforts and President Putin’s objectives beyond that too,” she continued.

More on Austin’s comments: Speaking after visiting Kyiv on Sunday, Austin outlined some of the United States’ goals as the country continues to support Ukraine’s efforts in the war.

“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Austin said at a news conference at an undisclosed location in Poland near the Ukrainian border following the trip to Kyiv. 

Psaki said the comment was in line with the administration’s views of the conflict.

“I would say it’s consistent with our view, and the President’s view, and Secretary Austin’s view that we are going to do everything we can to push back on President Putin’s aspirations to subsume Ukraine, to take over their territorial integrity and their sovereignty, and aspirations he had as of two months ago to go beyond that,” she said.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin took the train from Poland to meet with Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, in Kyiv on Sunday.

View the tweet here:

The Defense Ministry in Ukraine has described explosions that took place in the Transnistria region of neighboring Moldova as a “planned provocation” by the Russian secret services.

The ministry’s defense intelligence department said in a statement on its Telegram channel that three days before the incident, the leaders of the breakaway region “were already preparing for it and took care to install a secure and comfortable bunker” at the Ministry of State Security, which was damaged in the explosions. 

“Obviously, this case is one of a number of provocative measures organized by the FSB (the Russian security service) to instill panic and anti-Ukrainian sentiment,” it said.

What Russia is saying: Earlier Monday, Russian state news agency RIA-Novosti reported a series of explosions were heard around the building of the Ministry of State Security in Tiraspol, the capital of the separatist statelet of Transnistria in Moldova.

A correspondent for Russian state news agency RIA-Novosti reported explosions, saying that powerful booms were heard on the scene and that windows in neighboring houses were damaged. Traffic near the ministry building was blocked, the agency reported.

Russia has maintained a contingent of troops inside Transnistria since the early 1990s. Last week, a top Russian general said Russia intended to establish “full control” over southern Ukraine in the second phase of its invasion of Ukraine, adding that control over Ukraine’s south would give Russian forces access to Transnistria. 

CNN’s Nathan Hodge contributed reporting to this post.

Ukrainian officials and the Russian Defense Ministry have reported another day of heavy fighting in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk.

Serhiy Hayday, head of the Luhansk region military administration, said on Ukrainian television Monday that the Russians “keep razing everything to the ground.”

He referred to a village on the frontlines, Novotoshkivka, which now lies in ruins.

Drone video from the area showed that much of the village has been destroyed.

Hayday said Russian forces were still trying to break through in the neighboring towns of Rubizhne and Popasna. “They don’t get anything there. But they throw huge forces there. And shelling is carried out there around the clock.”

Hayday also said that the Russians had “damaged the electricity substation that powered the entire region.”

Further west, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that four command posts and one ammunition depot near the town of Sloviansk had been destroyed. Russian forces have been targeting Sloviansk and nearby Kramatorsk as they try to reach the borders of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. It also said another Ukrainian military target — in the town of Novogrodovka — had been hit. 

The Russians have amassed forces around the town of Izium, which they occupied at the beginning of April, but have made little progress since. Ukrainian officials reported fighting around the nearby village of Zavody Monday. 

The General Staff of the Ukrainian armed forces said the “enemy continues to carry out offensive operations in the Eastern Operational Zone to defeat the Joint forces, establish full control over the territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and maintain the land route with the occupied Crimea.”

Local resident Oksana surveys the destroyed second floor of her multi-generational home while searching for salvageable items on Monday, April 25, in Hostomel, a suburb of Kyiv.

Russian forces struck five railway stations in central and western Ukraine on Monday morning as part of a campaign to “systematically destroy railway infrastructure,” according to the chairman of Ukrzaliznytsia, Ukraine’s state railway company. The rail system has become a vital cog in the country’s war effort, ferrying essential supplies in, and desperate civilians out of harm’s way.

Russia has made only “minor advances” since shifting their focus to taking control over the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) said Monday. “Without sufficient logistical and combat support enablers in place, Russia has yet to achieve a significant breakthrough,” said the MoD on Twitter.

Here are more of the latest headlines from the Russia-Ukraine war:

Maria Shtern, 21, stands in front of her car which she uses to deliver supplies to frontline towns in Ukraine, on Monday, April 25.

Day after day, Maria Shtern gets into her rusty Lada car and drives the rutted roads of eastern Ukraine.

Shtern, 21, has been volunteering for more than five years on the frontlines of Ukraine’s conflict with Russia – first with its proxies in the Donbas region, now with its military.

On this sunny spring Monday, in a uniform of camouflage cargo pants and hemp leaf bucket hat, she’s delivering food and medicine to homes to the village of Mykolaivka.

“Many people just do not understand that what was in 2014 in Slovyansk and what can happen now are two very different scenarios,” she told CNN.

Every day, Shtern tries to put herself out of a job, telling her patrons to evacuate.

“I am asking people a specific question: Are you ready to hear your children crying and saying, ‘Mom, I’m scared to die?’” she said.

As the Russian military closes in, and commercial supply lines stop, Shtern’s deliveries of food and medicine are the only lifeline for many people. The Russians have captured Izium, a nearby urban center, and their artillery is bombarding the town of Lyman, just a few miles down the road.

She weaves though the chicanes of checkpoints, past the husks of buildings destroyed in 2015, and alongside gardens blooming with tulips planted long before people even in this war-torn region could have imagined a full-scale war with Russia.

In Mykolaivka, each resident is faced with the same decision every day: stay or go.

The torment is visible in a woman who approaches us and yells that she has no idea what will happen, but she cannot leave.

“My elderly grandmother, who is 80 and can hardly walk, I can’t leave her. Do you understand? It’s my family. Don’t you have families at home that you can’t leave behind? Not under any circumstances,” she tells CNN.

Natalia Maligon is among the residents who have had enough and have chosen to leave.

“My sister woke up this morning and said we had to leave,” she explains as her twin nieces run between the elder branches. “We didn’t want to leave until the last minute, but then something made her want to. So we had to.”

Olha Konovalova contributed reporting to this post.

The European Union has evacuated around 200 Ukrainian patients requiring urgent medical care from Ukraine and neighboring countries to hospitals in other European nations, European Commission spokesperson Balazs Ujvari said on Monday. 

Following requests from Poland, Slovakia, Moldova and also Ukraine, the EU has transferred Ukrainian patients who need specialized medical help to hospitals in “11 different European countries,” Ujvari explained.  

The transfer of patients has been supported the EU’s first dedicated medical evacuation plane, which has been operational since March. 

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is currently on a plane en route to Moscow, Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary-General Farhan Haq said Monday.

Guterres will be “received” by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and will have a working meeting and lunch with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. He is also scheduled to travel to Kyiv and meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Thursday. 

Haq also said that while Guterres has not spoken with United States President Joe Biden ahead of his upcoming trip to Moscow and Kyiv, he has spoken with other senior US officials.

“He has been speaking to senior US officials and indeed, many other senior officials by phone in recent days,” Haq said. “He talks to a number of different leaders. I wouldn’t characterize what their discussions are in any particular detail, but certainly, he is apprised of the viewpoints of most of the key governments in terms of what needs to be achieved.”

Haq declined to go into detail Monday about the sort of proposals Guterres is bringing to his meetings but noted that officials from both Ukraine and Russia accepted the itinerary. He added that there is no significance to the Secretary-General visiting Russia before visiting Ukraine. Travel plans remain in flux and it’s possible that Guterres will stop in a third country in between his meetings in Moscow and Kyiv, Haq said.

A senior official in Ukraine’s Interior Ministry says there has been a large explosion in the town of Kreminna in the Luhansk region, an area recently occupied by Russian forces.

Anton Gerashchenko said the explosion took place at an administrative building in the town. Ukrainian forces withdrew from Kreminna last week.

“Simultaneously with the natural gas explosion in the building of the city council, there was a second explosion of domestic gas in the district police department, where a group of collaborators had gone for a meeting,” he said.

CNN cannot verify the number of casualties nor the origin of the explosion.

Dmitry Polyanskiy, First Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia's mission to the United Nations, during a news conference at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on April 25, 2022.

A deputy to Russia’s ambassador to the UN took to the stakeout podium at the UN Monday to say that a ceasefire in Ukraine is not a good option right now.

He also alleged that Ukraine, with backing from the US, was preparing to deploy “chemical, biological, and tactical nuclear weapons” in a false flag operation, and claim that Russia had been responsible. 

The representative also said he did not think it was time for a humanitarian ceasefire.

Polyanskiy was speaking on the eve of the UN secretary general’s visit to Russia, where he will be received by President Vladimir Putin.

“Our ministry of defense keeps collecting information that the Kyiv regime backed by the US is preparing staged provocations in order to accuse the Russian armed forces of using chemical, biological, and tactical nuclear weapons,” Polyanskiy said. 

Still, Polyanskiy gave several speculative scenarios in which he claimed a Ukrainian attack could happen. 

He urged the media to take note of specific locations so it “does not come as a surprise if an incident happens” adding “we have warned the world about it.”

“What has long been considered as unthinkable is now a realistic scenario plotted by the Kyiv regime, encouraged and supported by the USA,” he continued, parroting the accusations of Russian leaders.

He added “the US and its allies have a proven record of using (allegations of) weapons of mass destruction… to assault sovereign countries which do not want to succumb to their pressure,” referencing justifications US officials gave for previous military actions in Iraq and Syria.  

The Russian diplomat also denied that the Russians were responsible for the killing of civilians in Bucha where CNN found mass graves. 

US military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine could be at risk of being bogged down in the immigration battle brewing on Capitol Hill between Republicans and the Biden administration.

The Biden administration is expected to send another supplemental request to Congress this week for Ukraine after warning that money from the last package is nearly depleted. But, while there is broad support on Capitol Hill to give Ukraine more assistance, the path to passage is much more uncertain in the U.S. Senate.

It’s still not clear what vehicle Democrats would use to pass Ukraine aid, but one likely option would be to attach the aid to $10 billion in COVID-19 funding that is already moving through the Senate. Attaching Ukraine aid to money for COVID-19 testing and treatments, however, could put the critical wartime aid in the crosshairs of political infighting over immigration.

Where things stand on Covid relief: Before the recess, the $10 billion COVID-19 relief package stalled out after Republicans insisted they wouldn’t fast-track the process unless Democrats agreed to vote on an amendment that would block the administration’s decision to overturn Title 42, a Trump-era order that during the pandemic allowed both the Trump and Biden administrations to turn immigrants at the border back to their home countries immediately citing a public health crisis. That order is expected to be overturned at the end of May, but the decision faces stiff opposition from Republicans and some moderate Democrats who have warned the decision will cause an uptick of illegal crossings at the border.

In order to pass Covid-19 relief quickly before the recess, Republicans argued they wanted a vote to block the administration’s decision on Title 42. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wouldn’t give it to them.

Talks over how to pass both covid relief and Ukraine aid will begin Monday when lawmakers return to Washington. Schumer has also made it clear that he wants to include global vaccine funding in a Ukraine aid package. The vaccine funding wasn’t included in the $10 billion Covid package because of opposition from Republicans in the negotiations.

Why the Biden administration needs more money for Ukraine: The reason the Biden administration says it needs more money for Ukraine now is that the administration has used $2.45 billion out of the $3 billion in funding Congress authorized in Presidential Drawdown Authority funding as of April 22, according to a source familiar with the matter. Congress authorized $3 billion in that specific pot of money when they passed the omnibus spending bill in March.

Overall, Congress passed $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine when they passed their government funding package in March. That included increasing the specific pot of money the administration had at its discretion to spend for Ukraine to $3 billion.

But the pot of money is running out. After six weeks, the Biden Administration has used up all but about $50 million of a $3 billion pot. Lawmakers are already having preliminary discussions about writing and passing another supplemental aid package for Ukraine, but conversations are still preliminary, a Congressional aide said.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the administration does not want to run out of funding from the Presidential Drawdown Authority before another supplemental aid package is passed in Congress.

“We are getting close to the end of those funds, and so that’s why we are actively engaging with members of Congress,” Kirby told reporters during a briefing at the Pentagon Friday. “We don’t want to get to a point [sic] where we’re in extremes, where we’ve actually run out of the authority and the funding to execute it. So we’re having those discussions.”

Last week, the top Republican of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Jim Inhofe, called for Congress to start writing a new supplemental aid package for Ukraine in a series of tweets.

Russia announced on Monday that it was expelling 40 German diplomats from the country in a retaliatory move to Berlin’s decision in early April to expel a “substantial number” of officials at the Russian embassy. 

Summoned by the Russian foreign ministry Monday, the German ambassador to Moscow was “met with strong protest in connection with the openly hostile decision of the German government,” the ministry said. 

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called Moscow’s decision to expel diplomats “unjustified.” 

In contrast to the German diplomatic staff declared as “persona non grata,” the members of the Russian embassy that [Germany] expelled three weeks ago “did not spend a day engaged in diplomatic service,” Baerbock said. 

“Their work threatened all who seek shelter with us — we could no longer tolerate this and will not do so in the future,” the foreign minister added.  

In early April, Baerbock had said that the expelled Russian officials had been “working against our freedom and against cohesion of our society here in Germany every day.” 

Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod talks to media before an EU Foreign Affairs Ministers meeting in Brussels, Belgium, on March 21.

The West needs to make sure the cost for Russia for the war in Ukraine is “as high as possible,” Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod told CNN on Monday.

Stopping Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine means European nations must impose further sanctions on Russia and send more military aid to Kyiv, he continued.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen promised on a visit to Kyiv Thursday to send more military assistance to Ukraine, increasing contribution by $87 million to around $144 million.  

Denmark will increase its natural gas production in the North Sea “for a limited time period,” to reduce its dependency on Russian energy imports, Frederiksen said on Tuesday, adding that the country is ultimately aiming to phase out its use natural gases to become independent of Russian supplies. 

“Everything is on the table from the Danish side. We are ready to do the most sanctions we can agree upon,” Kofod told CNN. “Of course, continuing to offer support to isolate Russia politically with our partners, but also the rest of the world — that is really what we had to.”