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Here’s where things stand on Friday 25 July 2025:

Fighting

• Ukraine and Russia have attacked targets on each other’s territory after brief direct talks between the two sides in Istanbul failed to make any progress on steps to end nearly three-and-a-half years of war.
• Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Kuleba said Russia launched 103 drones and four missiles during its overnight attack, hitting civilian infrastructure, including seaports, transport hubs, and residential areas.
• One person was killed and four others injured after Russian forces staged the latest in a series of mass drone attacks on Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa. The attack also caused several fires as well as damage to the historic centre, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
• At least two people were killed and at least 33 others wounded after Russian glide bombs struck a residential neighbourhood in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city in the northeast of the country, officials said.
• One person was killed in a drone attack in Ukraine’s Sumy region on the northern border with Russia, where Moscow’s forces have established a foothold in recent months.
• Russia also attacked the central Ukrainian region of Cherkasy overnight, injuring seven people, including a nine-year-old child, and damaging more than a dozen residential apartment buildings.
• Emergency officials in Russia’s Krasnodar region on the Black Sea said debris from a falling drone struck and killed a woman in the Adler district near the resort city of Sochi. A second woman was being treated in hospital for serious injuries.
• The administrative head of the Sirius federal district, south of Sochi, said a drone hit an oil terminal, giving no further details. Russia’s aviation authority also said operations were suspended at Sochi airport for about four hours.
• Russian forces have taken control of the villages of Zvirove and Novoekonomichne in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, the Russian Ministry of Defence said. The claim could not be independently verified.
• Russian forces are making every effort to establish buffer zones along the border with Ukraine, state news agency RIA Novosti quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying.

Military aid

• The United States Department of State has approved potential military sales, including air defence, to Ukraine worth $330m, the Pentagon said.
• An Indian company – Ideal Detonators Private Limited – shipped $1.4m worth of an explosive compound with military uses to Russia in December, according to Indian customs data seen by the Reuters news agency, despite US threats to impose sanctions on any entity supporting Russia’s Ukraine war effort.

Politics and diplomacy

• President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has blamed Russia for rejecting a proposal presented during the Istanbul talks for an immediate and complete ceasefire. He said that instead of accepting a truce deal, Russian drones struck residential buildings in Ukraine.
• Zelenskyy has submitted draft legislation to restore the independence of Ukraine’s anticorruption agency NABU and anticorruption prosecution unit SAPO, reversing course after an outburst of public criticism over his attempt to remove their status as independent organisations.
• The Kremlin said it was hard to see how Russian President Vladimir Putin could meet Zelenskyy before the end of August, RIA reported. Earlier, a Ukrainian official suggested that Kyiv had proposed a Putin-Zelenskyy meeting in August, within the 50-day deadline set by the US for both sides to reach a ceasefire deal.
• The European Union has expressed its expectations that China will respond to the EU’s concerns and use its influence to urge Russia towards accepting a ceasefire in Ukraine, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said following her meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
• Russia Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has accused German Chancellor Friedrich Merz of pursuing a path of “militarisation” and said this was a cause for concern. She said Berlin is pursuing an openly hostile policy, and that Merz was stepping up anti-Russian rhetoric “literally every day”.

Economy

• Ukraine’s Central Bank Governor Andriy Pyshnyy said his government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – Kyiv’s key international lender – were working on a new lending programme. Ukraine currently has a $15.5bn four-year lending programme with the IMF that is set to expire in 2027. Kyiv has received about $10.6bn under the programme so far.

Ukraine’s Zelenskyy introduces bill after anticorruption protests

Ukrainian leader came under domestic and international pressure after signing law critics say curbs the powers of the country’s anitcorruption agencies.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has submitted a new draft bill to the country’s legislature, in an effort to calm outrage over a previously passed law that critics say paves the way for corruption.

The country’s anticorruption agencies quickly hailed the bill’s introduction on Thursday, saying it would restore their “procedural powers and guarantees of independence”.

The  Ukrainian leader has contended with protests and condemnation from both within Ukraine and from its closest European allies after a separate controversial law was passed on Tuesday.

That law placed the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) under the direct authority of the country’s prosecutor general – a position appointed by the president.

Zelenskyy initially maintained that the law was needed to respond to suspected “Russian influence” within the agencies amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Critics, however, said the law would strip the bodies of their independence and could allow political interference, while failing to address any potential Kremlin-linked operatives.

On Tuesday, thousands of Ukrainians defied martial law – which has been in place since the beginning of Russia’s war – to take to the streets of Kyiv and other major cities to protest against the law.

European  officials also questioned the law, noting that addressing corruption remains a core requirement both for Ukraine’s future European Union membership and in assuring aid flows to combat Russia.

Amid the pressure, Zelenskyy backed away from the new law, promising to submit new legislation that would assure “all the norms for the independence of anti-corruption institutions will be in place” and that there would be no Russian “influence or interference”.

Opposition lawmakers have also separately prepared their own legislation to revoke the law passed on Tuesday.

“They heroically solved the problems that they created just as heroically. Grand imitators,” Yaroslav Zhelezniak, from the opposition Holos party, said on Telegram, criticising Zelenskyy and his allies about-turn.

Before the new draft bill’s introduction, Zelenskyy spoke with the leaders of Germany and the United Kingdom on Thursday.

In a statement, Zelenskyy’s office said British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had “offered to involve experts who could contribute to long-term cooperation” on the issue.

In a post on X, Zelenskyy said he invited Friedrich Merz to “join the expert review of the bill”.

“Friedrich assured me of readiness to assist,” he said.

It was not immediately clear when Ukraine’s legislature, the Verkhovna Rada, would vote on the new bill.

Russia and Ukraine trade drone attacks after latest ceasefire talksRussia and Ukraine trade drone attacks after latest ceasefire talks

Russia and Ukraine trade drone attacks after latest ceasefire talks

Drone strikes by both Moscow and Kyiv killed two in Russia and three in Ukraine, hours after a brief third round of ceasefire talks concluded in Istanbul.

Three people were found dead in the rubble of a house after a strike in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region and several people were wounded in the cities of Cherkasy and Zaporizhzhia.

In the Black Sea port city of Odesa the famous Pryvoz market, as well as a central boulevard which is a Unesco world heritage site, were also hit.

Several fires broke out across the city following an overnight attack, authorities said.

Meanwhile, Russian authorities said two people were killed and 11 injured in an overnight Ukrainian drone strike on Sochi, in Russia’s Krasnodar region.

Another Russian attack on the Ukrainian city Kharkiv on Thursday morning also left 33 injured.

Ukrainian and Russian delegations met on Wednesday evening in Istanbul in the third round of ceasefire talks.

Neither side appeared to harbour much hope for progress before start of the talks, which according to the head of the Ukrainian delegation lasted barely an hour.

The head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, said both countries agreed to swap 1,200 prisoners of war and that Russia had offered to transfer 3,000 bodies of fallen Ukrainian soldiers back to Kyiv.

But no tangible steps were taken to end the conflict, now well into its fourth year, and both sides accused the other of rejecting their ideas.

“We did not expect a breakthrough. A breakthrough is hardly possible,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Thursday.

Ahead of the meeting the head of the Ukrainian delegation, Rustem Umerov, said the “priority” for Kyiv was to organise a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before the end of August.

But Peskov poured cold water on the idea, saying it was “premature” for the two presidents to meet.

“They [Ukraine] are trying to put the cart slightly ahead of the horse,” he said, adding much more work had to be done before any such meeting could take place.

Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Hocharenko said on Facebook that a separate meeting between Umerov and Medinsky had taken place behind closed doors on the sidelines of the main talks.

Hocharenko said Umerov and Medinsky have a “good relationship”.

The first two rounds of ceasefire talks were held in May and June at the request of US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly said he wants to see the end of the “horrible, bloody war” that was sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Earlier this month Trump set a deadline of 50 days for Russia and Ukraine to end the war, threatening “severe tariffs” on Moscow if a deal is not reached.

Russia has long refused to budge on its preconditions for peace – namely the removal of the “root causes” of the war, which include Ukraine becoming a neutral state, dramatically reducing its military and abandoning its Nato aspirations.

None of these are acceptable to Kyiv, or to its Western allies.

“We will do everything to make diplomacy work,” Zelensky said on social media on Thursday after the talks. “But it is Russia that must end this war that it started itself.”

No survivors after plane carrying 48 people goes down in Russian far east

Russian officials say 48 people were killed when an Angara Airlines plane went down in a dense forest in the far-eastern Amur region.

The Antonov An-24 plane, carrying 42 passengers and six crew, had left Blagoveshchensk close to the Chinese border and vanished from radar screens as it approached Tynda airport, officials said.

A Russian civil aviation helicopter then spotted burning fuselage from the plane on a remote hillside about 16km (10 miles) from Tynda.

Amur’s regional governor Vasily Orlov said five children were among those on board and declared three days of mourning.

The remote, swampy nature of the area meant that rescuers took about an hour to reach the scene.

Preliminary inquiries are looking at either pilot error in poor weather conditions or technical malfunction, according to emergency officials.

The An-24 plane had been on the final leg of a route from Khabarovsk in the far south-east of Russia.

There was low cloud at the time of the crash, and the plane had already made a failed attempt to land at the airport, emergency services said. Radar contact was lost while the crew was preparing for a second approach, they added.

Angara Airlines is based in the Irkutsk region of Siberia and the crew all came from the Irkutsk region. A number of the passengers were working for Russian Railways in the far east.

The Antonov 24 plane was almost 50 years old and originally designed in Kyiv during the Soviet era, although this model has not been used in Ukraine for several years.

Officials said the plane had passed a recent technical inspection, but the civil aviation authority told news agencies it had been involved in four incidents since 2018.

Seven years ago its left wing had been damaged when the plane overran a runway and hit a lightning mast, Tass news agency said.

Other An-24 planes have been involved in fatal crashes, too.

An An-24RV veered off the runway as it landed at Nizhneangarsk Airport in July 2019. Two members of the flight crew were killed.

In 2011, another Angara An-24 crashed into the Ob river in Siberia, killing seven passengers.

After the 2011 crash, then-president Dmitry Medvedev said An-24 planes that were still in service in Russia should be grounded.