By Alastair McCready and News Agencies

Published On 24 Oct 202524 Oct 2025

Here is how things stand on Friday, October 24, 2025:

Fighting

• Ukrainian authorities have opened a war crime investigation into an incident in which a witness said Russian forces shot dead five civilians in a village in eastern Ukraine. The Donetsk region’s prosecutor’s office said a man, his two sons and two neighbours were killed on October 20 in Zvanivka, near the front line in Donetsk.
• A Russian drone has killed Olena Hubanova and Yevhen Karmazin, journalists with Ukraine’s state-funded Freedom television channel, in the eastern city of Kramatorsk.
• Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the killing of the journalists, which was branded a war crime by Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman.
• Kyiv’s forces struck Russia’s Ryazan oil refinery overnight, Ukraine’s general staff said, causing a massive fire at the plant, which is critical for Russian military supplies. Ukrainian drones also hit an ammunition depot in Russia’s Belgorod region.
• Engineers have repaired a damaged high-voltage line and restored external power to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station in Ukraine, the facility’s Russian-installed management said. The plant – Europe’s largest nuclear power station, consisting of six reactors – was seized by Russian troops in 2022. It currently produces no electricity, but needs external power to cool the nuclear fuel and avoid the risk of a meltdown.
• With Russia sharply increasing its attacks on Ukraine’s energy system, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said Kyiv has allocated $200 million in emergency aid to the state-owned energy firm Naftogaz for gas imports in advance of winter.
• Russia and Ukraine exchanged more bodies of their war dead, the Russian RBC news outlet reported, saying Moscow handed over 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers and received 31 bodies of its own in return.
• North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said military brotherhood with Russia would “advance nonstop”, state media KCNA reported, during a speech at the groundbreaking ceremony for a memorial for soldiers who fought in Russia’s Kursk region against Ukrainian forces.

Sanctions

• Russian President Vladimir Putin remained defiant after United States President Donald Trump hit Russia’s two biggest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, with sanctions to pressure him to end the war in Ukraine.
• Putin derided the sanctions as an unfriendly act, saying they would not significantly affect the Russian economy and talked up Russia’s importance to the global market. “No self-respecting country and no self-respecting people ever decides anything under pressure,” Putin said.
• Asked about Putin’s comment that the new sanctions would not have a significant impact, President Trump said: “I’m glad he feels that way. That’s good. I’ll let you know about it in six months from now.”
• German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he assumes Rosneft’s German business subsidiaries will be granted an exemption from the sanctions. Rosneft’s German business is controlled by German authorities but is Russian-owned.
• OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) is ready to offset any shortage in the oil market due to sanctions on Russia by rolling back its output cuts, Kuwait’s oil minister Tareq al-Roumi said.
• Deputy chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, said Trump’s decision to cancel a summit in Budapest and impose sanctions on Russia showed Washington was “on the warpath” with Moscow.

Financial and military aid

• At a meeting in Brussels on Thursday, European Union leaders agreed to meet Ukraine’s “pressing financial needs” for the next two years but stopped short of endorsing a plan to use frozen Russian assets to fund a giant loan to Kyiv due to concerns raised by Belgium.
• Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever said his country needs concrete and solid guarantees before supporting the plan, which he described as entering “uncharted territory”. Belgium has cautioned against seizing the assets, which are held by Belgian financial institution Euroclear, arguing it could expose the firm to litigation and trigger a financial crisis.
• At the meeting, President Zelenskyy urged European allies to supply Ukraine with long-range weapons after failing to secure a promise from Trump to provide Kyiv with powerful Tomahawk missiles.
• Zelenskyy also said Ukraine should be able to use Russia’s frozen assets for domestic weapons production and to buy European and US weapons.
• Finland will buy US weapons for Ukraine worth 100 million euros ($116.62m), Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat reported, citing Prime Minister Petteri Orpo.

Peace talks

• A meeting between Trump and Putin is not completely off the table, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said. “I think the president and the entire administration hopes that one day that can happen again, but we want to make sure that there’s a tangible positive outcome out of that meeting,” she said.
• Britain called for several measures against Russia to strengthen Ukraine’s hand in advance of any future peace talks, as Zelenskyy heads to London for discussions with key allies on Friday.
• British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office said he would hold a meeting of the “coalition of the willing” countries that have pledged to strengthen support for Ukraine, take Russian oil and gas off the global market, use frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine, and give Kyiv more long-range missiles.
• The talks in London will be a mixture of in-person and virtual, with NATO chief Mark Rutte, Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen expected to join.

Regional security

• NATO member Lithuania said two Russian military aircraft entered its airspace on Thursday for about 18 seconds, prompting a formal protest and a reaction from NATO forces, while Russia denied the incident. The two aircraft, an Su-30 fighter and an Il-78 refuelling tanker, were possibly on a refuelling training mission when they flew 700 metres (0.43 miles) into Lithuania from the Kaliningrad region.
• British police said they arrested three men suspected of assisting a foreign intelligence service, and that the offences related to Russia.