1,293 political violence events
2% decrease compared to last week
76 incidents of violence targeting civilians
5% decrease compared to last week
At least 21 fatalities from civilian targeting
56% decrease compared to last week
Key trends
- Russian forces occupied two settlements southwest of Toretsk and advanced near Velyka Novosilka, Kurakhove, and Lyman in the Donetsk region.
- In the Sumy region, Russian forces continued to gain ground, occupying at least one settlement near the border.
- ACLED records at least 27 Russian long-range missile and drone strikes, including in the Khmelnytskyi, Zhytomyr, and Kyiv regions and Kyiv city. Ukrainian forces intercepted at least 54 drones across Ukraine, including 30 near Kyiv city, as well as a missile in the Khmelnytskyi region.
- Russian shelling, missiles, aerial bombs, and drones killed at least 20 civilians in the Donetsk, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, and Zhytomyr regions and the city of Kyiv.
- Ukrainian drones and shelling reportedly killed at least ten civilians in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, including four in proximity to Russian military positions. Additionally, two children were killed by a suspected Ukrainian shell in Donetsk.
Key events
- 8 Apr. | Dnipropetrovsk – Repeated Russian drone and missile strikes kill one and injure 26 civilians in Dnipro over two days
- 10 Apr. | Mykolaiv – A Russian drone strike injures 10 civilians in Mykolaiv city
- 11 Apr. | Zhytomyr – Russian drones kill one and injure five civilians in Ozerne
Spotlight: Russian targeting of Sumy leaves scores dead
On the morning of 13 April, two Russian ballistic missiles carrying cluster munitions hit Sumy city center, killing at least 35 civilians and injuring 117 others.1Vitalii Hnidyi and Max Hunder, “Russian missile strike kills 35 in Ukraine’s Sumy, Kyiv says,” Reuters, 14 April 2025 The mass civilian fatality event (which involves at least 10 civilian deaths ) occurred less than 10 days after a similar attack on Kryvyi Rih in the Dnipropetrovsk region and became the deadliest strike since October 2023, when a Russian ballistic missile killed 59 civilians at a wake luncheon for a fallen soldier in Hroza in the Kharkiv region.
Russia began ramping up remote attacks on the Sumy region and its eponymous capital in March 2024. The number of strikes increased further in August when Ukrainian forces seized a part of Russia’s Kursk region, which they held until mid-March 2025. The aerial targeting of the Sumy region with glide bombs and drones — the former launched beyond the ranges of Ukraine’s air defense — became Russia’s preferred tactic over routine cross-border shelling since Russia’s retreat from the region in the first month of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since August 2024, Russian strikes have killed at least 161 civilians in the Sumy region, in contrast to over 200 during the previous two and a half years of war.
Since the beginning of 2025, ACLED records at least six mass civilian fatality events in the Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Poltava, Donetsk, and Sumy regions. This compares to 14 such events in 2024 and 11 in 2023. Over half of about 90 such events occurred in 2022 as part of indiscriminate targeting and apparent atrocities committed by the Russian forces in the early weeks of the invasion.
Explore the ACLED Conflict Exposure tool to assess the numbers of people affected by armed violence, disaggregated by locations, time period, and actors involved.
