Here is the situation as it stands on Monday, April 3, 2023:

Diplomacy

• The European Union said it will guard against any abuse during Russia’s presidency of the United Nations Security Council during the month of April.
• Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany has criticised former high-ranking politicians in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the country’s labour movement for issuing an appeal for peace talks with Russia.
• The US State Department said Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in a rare phone call since the start of the Ukraine war, to immediately release detained Americans, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.
• US basketball star Brittney Griner, released from a Russian penal colony in a prisoner exchange last year, has urged the White House to keep using “every tool possible” to win the release of Gershkovich, who was detained on charges of spying in Russia.
• Russia will not send fencers to an Olympic-qualifying event in Poland this month because of “unacceptable” conditions, the head of the Russian Fencing Federation said.

Fighting

• A well-known Russian military blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed in an explosion in a café in Russia’s second-largest city of Saint Petersburg on Sunday.
• A pro-Russian official in Ukraine held Kyiv responsible for the blast, but a top Ukrainian official speculated that internal Russian opposition to the Kremlin’s invasion was to blame.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the military situation around the city of Bakhmut, besieged by Russian forces for months, is “especially hot”.
• Six civilians have been killed and eight wounded in Russian shelling of Kostiantynivka, an industrial city in eastern Ukraine, according to Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff.
• Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, has outlined a series of steps the government in Kyiv would take after the country reclaims control of Crimea, including dismantling the strategic bridge that links the seized Black Sea peninsula to Russia.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin warned he would be forced to react if the United Kingdom supplied Ukraine with armour-piercing ammunition containing depleted uranium.
• Meanwhile, the British defence ministry said excessive alcohol consumption has been the cause of many deaths among Russian forces in Ukraine.