Sitrep for March 31-April 4, 2025 (as of 10 a.m. UTC+3)

Frontline Situation Update

Fighting continues for the village of Guyevo in the Kursk region, as confirmed by a video filmed inside a destroyed building showing Russian soldiers. According to our assessment, Guyevo remains largely a contested zone, with only a small part of the village under Russian control.

On April 3, analysts from DeepState updated their map, showing a reduction in the area controlled by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Kursk region, west of the village of Oleshnya. However, the Sudzha border crossing point is still marked as under AFU control.

Fighting also continues in the Krasnoyaruzhsky district of the Belgorod region, near the villages of Popovka, Demidovka and Grafovka. Footage has emerged showing Ukrainian military equipment lost in combat, including a Bradley IFV, an M113 APC, an M88 recovery vehicle and a mine-clearing engineering vehicle.

Over the past three days, aside from the Novopavlivka (Kurakhove) direction, no significant changes have been observed along the frontline. Here is a brief overview of the main directions:

• In the Kharkiv direction, the situation has remained unchanged for a long time.
• In the Lyman direction, over the past week, the Russian Armed Forces have attempted to advance toward the village of Katerynivka, but without significant success.
• In the Toretsk direction, fighting continues for control of the town of Toretsk, and it is often difficult to determine who controls specific areas of the town. In the southern part of the direction, at the end of March, the RuAF captured—or nearly captured—the village of Panteleimonivka, southwest of the village of Niu-York, and entered the outskirts of the village of Oleksandropil.

• In the Pokrovsk direction, as part of preparations for an offensive toward the town of Kostiantynivka, the RuAF are still unsuccessfully attempting to widen the salient near the village of Vozdvyzhenka in order to advance toward the highway connecting Pokrovsk to Kostiantynivka. To do this, they need to capture the village of Yelyzavetivka—most likely by first bringing it into partial encirclement.

All this indirectly confirms the Russian command’s intent to advance on Kostiantynivka from Toretsk, Vozdvizhenka and Chasiv Yar in the coming months. After capturing Kostiantynivka, the RuAF’s next target will likely be the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration.

In the Novopavlivka direction, Russian troops have reinforced their positions around Andriivka, though, according to DeepState, they have not yet fully captured the village. Notably, it was in this area that the RuAF launched an attack with a column of armored vehicles toward the village of Oleksiivka. The AFU managed to repel the assault, striking all the equipment with artillery and drones—DeepState reported the loss of 12 vehicles. The infantry scattered, and casualties among personnel remain unknown. South of Andriivka, the RuAF succeeded in capturing the village of Rozlyv, which, for some reason, is marked as an enclave of Russian forces on the project’s map. We, however, suggest that the territory east of the village has already come under Russian control.

In the South Donetsk direction, Russia’s MoD and other Russian sources have claimed progress along the Mokri Yaly River and the capture of the village of Vesele, north of the village of Velyka Novosilka. Available footage shows attacks and strikes on Vesele. This does not provide grounds to assert that it has been taken, though fighting appears to be underway. A video has emerged showing a Russian soldier planting a flag on the roof of a destroyed building in Vesele.

Ukrainian and Russian Strikes

The authorities of the Belgorod region—more than two and a half years after the start of intense attacks on Shebekino (it is worth noting that civilians should have been evacuated from both the border zone and the town itself back then)—have finally decided to strengthen the protection of residential buildings against drone strikes. As a result, a decision was made to cover some apartment buildings with anti-drone netting. This process began in November 2024, and on March 21, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov reported that 41 out of the planned 60 houses had been covered. However, it appears that the effectiveness of these nets has not yet been tested in practice. The effectiveness of such nets is questionable, as the UAVs used in urban attacks—such as Lyutyi drones—carry larger warheads than the payload of small FPV drones, which typically drop artillery rounds and target armored vehicles (against which nets and slat armor can indeed be effective).

The Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (HUR) has released a video showing drone strikes in annexed Crimea, allegedly using Starlink equipment. The footage shows strikes on boats in the Black Sea and ground surveillance radars belonging to a TOR-M2 surface-to-air missile system. It is worth noting that in 2023, Elon Musk disabled Starlink service in Crimea, disrupting a potential HUR operation involving a landing on the peninsula.

A video has emerged showing the aftermath of a HIMARS MLRS strike on a staging base in the Belgorod region on March 23. According to the footage, one Mil Mi-8 helicopter is beyond repair and will be dismantled for parts, while a Mil Mi-28 sustained minor damage. Some sources have reported that Kamov Ka-52 helicopters were also hit, but there has been no visual confirmation of those claims. It is worth noting that, according to Russian Telegram channels, all helicopters except one were able to fly off from the site.

Throughout the week, the RuAF have been conducting near-daily strikes on the cities of Kharkiv and Kryvyi Rih, resulting in casualties and injuries.

Western Assistance

April 11 will mark the 27th meeting in the Ramstein format. For the first time, US representatives will not participate, not even online. As we previously noted, this suggests that the Trump administration does not view increasing arms supplies to Ukraine as a viable means of pressuring Putin into a peace deal.

Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Christopher G. Cavoli announced that 70,000 155mm rounds will be delivered to Ukraine in April as part of the Czech initiative. If this pace of deliveries continues (and it is claimed that all necessary resources are available to sustain it at least until September), a total of 840,000 rounds of this caliber will be supplied by the end of the year. It is worth noting that 155mm shells account for about a third of the total volume of ammunition deliveries.

According to Ukrainian officials and analysts, the AFU are not currently experiencing a severe shortage of artillery shells. There is relative parity in artillery fire and drone strikes between the AFU and the RuAF.

Peace Talks

According to sources from the independent media outlet Agentstvo [Agency], Putin has authorized two competing teams to conduct negotiations with the United States, leading to disputes during talks in Riyadh. The first team is led by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and presidential aide Yury Ushakov, while the second is headed by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. On April 2-3 Dmitriev traveled to Washington, where he met with Steven Witkoff. This was the first official Russian visit to the US since the start of the full-scale war. Following the meetings, Dmitriev stated that efforts are underway to restore direct air travel between Russia and the United States. He also claimed that American companies are ready to fill the market niches left by European firms that have exited Russia. Additionally, the visit included discussions on cooperation in the Arctic and the extraction of rare earth metals.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that a Ukrainian delegation will arrive in the US in the coming days to discuss an agreement on fossil and mineral resources. It is worth noting that Ukraine rejected a new American proposal for the agreement just a week ago.

On April 4, a meeting took place in Kyiv involving representatives from France, the UK and Ukraine to discuss the deployment of a peacekeeping contingent in Ukraine. According to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the discussions were aimed at reviewing proposals from the Ukrainian side.

Conscription, Mobilization and Contract Military Service

On April 1, the spring 2025 conscription campaign began. Once again, we strongly recommend avoiding conscription by any possible means—a fine or, in rare cases, a suspended sentence is far preferable to the risk of being killed or permanently disabled in the war.

It has been reported that an electronic draft register has been launched in Saint Petersburg and the Leningrad region, while in the Rostov region, this has not been implemented, and conscripts will receive paper draft notices instead.

The human rights organization Shkola Prizyvnika [Conscript School] released a report on violations recorded during the fall 2024 conscription campaign in Moscow. According to the organization, the past year conscription campaign was one of the most difficult in the entire history of monitoring, both for conscripts and for human rights defenders. The team received 77 reports of attempted forced conscription in the capital. The practice can be described as follows: a man arrives at the Unified Military Recruitment Center, where a decision is made about his conscription into the army. If he does not report to the military collection point, the Moscow draft office declares him "wanted," and his data is entered into the facial recognition system or passed to local authorities. The conscript is then apprehended at home or in the metro, detained and taken to the military collection point. While roundups in public places have occurred before, they have never been on such a large scale.

The death of another conscript has been reported. Ignat Vasilkin was sent to guard the border in the Kursk region in the fall of 2024, where he went missing in action. In March 2025, his mother received a message stating that his body had been discovered.

Aleksandr Sergeyev, a 34-year-old Russian soldier, who had previously been convicted of theft, robbery, murder and rape, returned from the war and is accused of raping and killing a 13-year-old girl in the Tver region. It can be assumed that the consequences of a large number of war-traumatized men returning home may further discourage authorities from making a decision on demobilization after a halt to the war.

Aleksandr Chernykh has published a major report in the Kommersant daily newspaper based on conversations with residents of the village of Nikolayevo-Darino in the Kursk region, who spent several months under occupation. Eyewitness accounts confirm that not all civilian deaths in the combat zone can be attributed to deliberate actions by Ukrainian forces—many were killed accidentally after finding themselves too close to the frontline.

We need your support to continue our efforts. Please consider making a monthly donation to CIT through our fundraising page or Patreon.