On the night of 24-25 February, the shelling of Kyiv continued. At the same time, Russian mechanized infantry approached the capital of Ukraine from the north and reached the outskirts of the city.

On 25 February, Russian troops took control of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Increased levels of radiation from the plant area were recorded. On the eastern side of the Dnieper, the Russians were slowed down by the fighting for Chernihiv. In eastern Ukraine, the Russians captured Konotop and continued to surround Kharkiv.

In the south, fighting continued in the Mariupol region on the Sea of Azov, with the attack coming from two directions, from the east and from the west, where the Russians carried out a landing operation.

26 February saw continued shelling of Kyiv. Russian rockets hit civilian targets.

Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of the Chechen Republic, announced the dispatch of Chechen soldiers to Ukraine to support the Russian army in its manoeuvres.

Conventional war was accompanied by war in cyberspace. On 23 February, the day before Russia invaded Ukraine, a number of cyberattacks had been launched against Ukraine. In April 2022, Microsoft reported that between 23 February and 8 April 2022, it had documented 37 Russian destructive cyberattacks in Ukraine. The Microsoft report cited by the Polish Press Agency showed that some Russian military moves in Ukraine, already when the war was in progress, were correlated with cyberattacks. An example was the rocket strike on the TV tower in Kyiv, which coincided with hacker attacks on the media outlets in the capital of Ukraine. Also, cyberattacks preceded the conventional attack by a year.

On 26 February, Ukraine launched its cyber warfare effort. On that day, almost 40 Russian websites were blocked, including Kremlin.ru, along with the servers of large Russian banks.

At night, the Russians continued shelling across Ukraine. A number of sabotage attacks were also carried out. Sabotage and reconnaissance groups reached the Cherkasy oblast in the central part of the country. The Russians surrounded Kyiv from the west, north and east.

During the fighting for Kharkiv on 27 February, the Russians blew up a gas pipeline and broke into the city, from which they were then forced out. Part of the Russian forces reached Poltava. Mariupol, Sumy and Mykolaiv kept fighting in defence.

Volodymyr Zelensky announced that he had filed a lawsuit against Russia with the International Court of Justice for baseless accusations of genocide allegedly committed by Ukraine in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Photo: Russia's bombing of Kiev. CC 4.0