Weekly Russia-Ukraine war summary: Russian forces reach border checkpoint in Kursk, “chaos” in Belgorod, Putin vows to “finish off” AFU

Following three days of negotiations in Riyadh, the U.S. and Russia reached agreements aimed at ensuring safe navigation in the Black Sea, supporting Russia’s access to global agricultural markets, and prohibiting strikes on energy infrastructure. Regarding the still-unfinalized U.S.–Ukraine “rare earths deal,” Bloomberg reports that Donald Trump’s administration is demanding that Kyiv grant the U.S. the “right of first offer” for investments in all infrastructure and natural resource extraction projects. This would give the United States unprecedented control over investment in Ukrainian roads, railways, ports, mines, oil, gas, and the extraction of critical minerals.

Vladimir Putin also announced his intentions to “finish off” the AFU and proposed introducing temporary external governance in Ukraine under the auspices of the United Nations in order to organize elections in the country.

Mutual shelling and sabotage

Throughout the past week, Ukraine’s Air Force reported (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) the downing of 519 drones — primarily Shahed-type UAVs and others of unidentified models — out of a total of 930 launched. An additional 283 drones were “radar-lost.” Ukraine also reported two launches of ballistic missiles from the Iskander-M tactical missile system, with no recorded interceptions.

Several of Russia’s strikes on civilian infrastructure led to a high number of casualties among the civilian population:

• On the evening of March 21, a missile strike on Zaporizhzhia killed an entire family: a mother, a father, and their 14-year-old daughter. Sixteen more people were injured.
  
• On the evening of March 22, in the Donetsk Region, Pokrovsk came under fire, resulting in three deaths (1, 2). The following day, March 23, another strike killed two more people in Pokrovsk and in the town of Donet’ske (not to be confused with the Russian-occupied regional center).
  
• During a nighttime raid on Kyiv on March 23, three people were killed and ten injured. Among the victims was another family: a father and his 5-year-old daughter died, while the mother was hospitalized.
  
• A missile strike on the city of Sumy injured 101 people, including 23 children. Residential buildings, infrastructure sites, and a school were damaged in the attack.

Meanwhile, the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported the destruction of 301 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones over internationally recognized Russian territory and the occupied Crimean Peninsula. The ministry also repeatedly accused Ukraine of attacking Russian energy infrastructure in violation of an agreed moratorium (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Ukraine’s General Staff has denied all such accusations.

Mykhailo Litvin, a communications advisor to President Zelensky, accused Russia of committing at least ten violations of the “energy ceasefire” since March 18 (1, 2). President Zelensky, in turn, vowed to provide evidence of these violations to the United States.

Six people were killed in a strike on the Kreminna District of the Luhansk Region — including three employees of Russian state media outlets. In Russia’s Belgorod Region, Channel One correspondent Anna Prokofieva was killed after a vehicle she was traveling in triggered a landmine.

According to calculations by volunteers at the independent open source intelligence (OSINT) project Conflict Intelligence Team (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), at least 46 civilians were killed and 374 injured over the past week as a result of shelling on civilian infrastructure on both sides of the front.

Losses

The independent exiled Russian publication Mediazona, in partnership with BBC News Russian and a team of volunteers, updated its ongoing tally of Russian military losses in the war based on open-source information. As of March 28, 2025, the named list of confirmed Russian fatalities includes 100,001 individuals.

Independent analyst Naalsio updated the count of visually confirmed military equipment and weapons losses by both Ukrainian and Russian forces in the Kursk Region as of March 24, 2025. Total Ukrainian losses are estimated at 790 units (114 of them observed between March 17–24), while Russian losses stood at 740 units (an increase of 20 in the same period).

New footage was released showing strikes on targets in Russian-occupied Crimea. Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR) reported successful hits on several radar systems — Podlet, Imbir, and Kasta-2E2 — as well as damage to the tugboat Fyodor Uryupin.