Ukraine war situation update 26 April – 2 May 2025

Key trends

• Russian forces occupied four settlements in total: one southwest of Pokrovsk, another south of Kramatorsk, and one more north of Lyman in the Donetsk region, in addition to a settlement east of Borova in the Kharkiv region.
• ACLED records at least 29 Russian long-range missile and drone strikes, including in the Kyiv region and Kyiv city, the northern region of Zhytomyr, and the central regions of Poltava and Kirovohrad.
• Russian shelling, missiles, aerial bombs, and drones killed at least 32 civilians in the Chernihiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Odesa, Sumy, and Zaporizhia regions. Ukrainian shelling and drone strikes reportedly killed four civilians in occupied Horlivka in the Donetsk region.

Spotlight: A suspected Russian intelligence agent attempts to kill an activist in Kyiv city

On 1 May, a woman reportedly recruited by Russian intelligence¹ shot Serhii Sternenko outside his apartment in Kyiv city. He sustained a non-life-threatening injury; police detained the woman. Sternenko has been a prominent pro-Ukrainian activist since 2014 and one of the largest private suppliers of drones for the Ukrainian military — his charitable foundation has purchased over 176,000 drones since February 2022.² The assassination attempt was likely meant to coincide with the 11th anniversary of the Odesa Trade Union building fire³, when pro-Ukrainian football fans set ablaze an encampment of pro-Russian activists following an ambush and clashes. The  fire killed 42 people, in addition to six people who were killed by firearms.¹ In a recent judgment, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Ukrainian authorities for failing to stop the outbreak of violence, rescue people trapped inside the building, and conduct an effective investigation.⁵ Sternenko, then the head of the local branch of the nationalist Right Sector party, was one of the several thousand pro-Ukrainian participants in the 2014 clashes in Odesa, which Russia frequently propagandizes to dehumanize pro-Ukrainian activists.⁶ Since then, he actively protested against illegal construction in Odesa, advocated for police reform, and disrupted concerts of Russian and pro-Russian artists.⁷ In 2018, Sternenko survived three attacks and accused the local Odesa authorities of being behind them.⁸ Two years after the last of these attacks, Sternenko was charged with killing one of his attackers, which led to a trial that was discontinued in December 2023.⁹

The recent attack on Sternenko is one of dozens of similar incidents reported in both Ukraine and Russia since the start of the war in 2022. On 14 March, an AWOL Ukrainian soldier shot dead an activist and volunteer in Odesa. Meanwhile, throughout April, car explosions killed the Ukrainian head of the Left Bank Administration of the Dnipro City Council, a Russian general in Moscow, and the head of a Russian design bureau working on developing electronic warfare for suppressing drones and his assistant in Bryansk.

Explore the ACLED Conflict Exposure tool to assess the numbers of people affected by armed violence, disaggregated by locations, time period, and actors involved.