KHARKIV OBLAST, UKRAINE, Apr 25 — In the Kupiansk direction, Russian troops tried to advance, but the Ukrainian army repelled their attack near the village of Berestove in the Kharkiv Oblast, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reports in the morning briefing.

Russians are not abandoning their goal of occupying Kupiansk, a town in the Kharkiv region, again. It is a logistics and railway hub between Kharkiv and Luhansk oblasts, and seizing it would allow the Russian army to boost its supply efforts. 

On April 24, Serhii Melnyk, head of the Kharkiv military garrison, said that the Russian troops resumed their attempts at an offensive on the Kupiansk axis but weren’t successful. “Ukrainian soldiers are professionally fulfilling the tasks of defending [this] direction and causing the enemy to lose manpower and equipment,” Melnyk said.

On April 18, the General Staff reported that Russians renewed localized assaults on the Kupiansk axis. On April 4, Kharkiv Oblast Governor Oleh Syniehubov said the fighting paused on the axis because Russians were rotating their units to compensate for significant losses. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assesses that one of the main efforts of the Russian full-scale invasion is to capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast. 

General Staff also reported that, in the Slobozhanskyi direction, in the border areas, the Russian military conducts intense sabotage activities to prevent the deployment of Ukrainian troops to more dangerous directions and increases the density of minefields along the state border in the Belgorod Oblast.

Also, according to the General Staff’s data, there were 104 combat clashes along the frontline over the past day. Russia launched 13 missile strikes and 56 airstrikes and fired 105 times from multiple launch rocket systems at the positions of Ukrainian troops and various towns and villages.

In total, the Russian army fired mortars and artillery at more than 120 settlements in the Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Kherson and Mykolaiv oblasts.

UPD from April 25, 12:06 p.m.: Inconsistency in the text fixed. It was the General Staff that reported about renewed Russian assaults in the Kupiansk direction on April 18.

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  • The Institute for the Study of War research group released a report saying the Kremlin is conducting a “concrete air and information operation” to destroy Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, and cause panic among Ukrainians, urging them to flee ahead of “possible Russian offensive.”