What did 18 April 2022 reveal about Russia's aims?

What did the fighting on 18 April 2022 show about the direction of Russia's war? A day of missile strikes in the west, a captured town in the east and an appointment in the south pointed to pressure on several fronts at once.

Strikes far from the front

A Russian missile strike on Lviv killed at least seven people and wounded 11, according to the head of the regional military administration, Maksym Kozytskyi. He said the missiles hit three military targets, while a fourth struck a tyre-fitting workshop. The strike came a day after missile attacks on Lviv killed six people, as reported on 17 April. Earlier, on 16 April, the Russian Air Force had launched airstrikes on Kyiv, and Russian missiles had hit Kharkiv, killing one person.

Russia's defence ministry described its own overnight activity differently. It said its forces had destroyed 16 Ukrainian military facilities in "mass strikes", including five command posts, a fuel depot and three ammunition warehouses. It also claimed to have shot down two Ukrainian MiG-29s and one Su-25.

The east: Kreminna falls

On the ground, Russian troops captured the city of Kreminna in Luhansk Oblast as part of a new offensive in the east. Ukrainian officials said the attackers had levelled everything. Russian artillery shelling of the city reportedly began overnight on Sunday, 17 April, and continued into Monday, killing four civilians. Local authorities said four refugees were shot dead while trying to escape the city.

The capture fitted the wider eastern offensive, in which the focus of Russian operations lay in Luhansk Oblast and beyond.

Mariupol and Azovstal

In Mariupol, the besieged port, most of the remaining Ukrainian soldiers and what was described as a large group of civilians had taken shelter inside the giant Azovstal iron and steel works as Russian forces advanced through the city. On 17 April Russia issued an ultimatum to the holdouts, described as Ukrainian troops and "foreign fighters". It demanded that they lay down their arms by 06:00 Moscow time and evacuate by 13:00. The defenders ignored it, and the plant remained the last holdout as 18 April began.

Occupation in the south

In the south, Igor Kastyukevich was appointed the de facto mayor of Kherson. Kherson was the only Ukrainian oblast capital captured during the invasion, so the appointment concerned a city under Russian control rather than one still contested.

Diplomacy and displacement

Two other threads from the preceding days sat alongside the fighting. On 16 April it was reported that the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich had visited Kyiv in an effort to revive peace talks between Russia and Ukraine. And on 17 April the Polish Border Guard reported that, for the first time since the invasion began, more Ukrainians entered Ukraine from Poland than left it.

What the day showed

Taken together, the events of 18 April 2022 showed a war being waged across the whole country: air and missile strikes reaching Lviv, Kyiv and Kharkiv; artillery and ground assault in Luhansk Oblast; a siege reduced to a single industrial complex in Mariupol; and administrative consolidation in occupied Kherson. Meanwhile, efforts to revive talks were reported, and some Ukrainians were returning from Poland, even as civilians were being killed in Lviv and Kreminna.