Here is today's map of the military situation in the east, courtesy of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council:
Kent Harstedt, Swedish lawmaker and head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE) temporary election observation mission to Ukraine, told journalists in Kyiv:
"This is an extraordinary election in many ways. What we are seeing here in Ukraine right now is that they are going for a parliamentary election where part of the country is illegally annexed by Russia, we have part of the country where there's a war-like situation. But we have also a situation where we have hundreds of thousands of IDPs [internally displaced persons] inside the country, and only that issue is a huge challenge for the administration here."
"There's so many challenges. I would say that security is one [of these challenges]. Another one is actually to mobilize voters to actually go and vote. Third one is to see to that those who are campaigning and are candidates, that they are not intimidated. And, then it's the pure administrative issue of be able to carry out voting both for all of those IDPs, but also in areas which are semi-secure."
"We see in facing up to this election more concerning reports - both against candidates [in] the elections, but we are also concerned about reports that there might be violence either directed directly to polling stations or in the vicinity of the polling stations."
This ends our live-blogging for October 25. Be sure to check back tomorrow for all our coverage of Ukraine's parliamentary elections.