Vladimir Putin has declared a unilateral 30-hour Easter ceasefire in Ukraine on Saturday, despite Volodymyr Zelensky warning that Russian air strikes continued on Saturday.
Putin ordered fighting to stop as of 6pm Moscow time (2pm BST) on Saturday until midnight on Easter Sunday.
“Based on humanitarian considerations … the Russian side announces an Easter truce. I order a stop to all military activities for this period,” Putin told Valery Gerasimov, Chief of Russia’s General Staff, at a televised meeting on Saturday.
“We assume that Ukraine will follow our example. At the same time, our troops should be prepared to repel possible violations of the truce and provocations by the enemy, any aggressive actions,” Putin added.
But shortly after the announcement, and around an hour before it was due to take effect, air raid sirens rang out in Kyiv. Ukrainian places were repelling Russian air strikes at least 45 minutes before the truce was meant to start, Volodymyr Zelensky said.
The Ukrainian president dismissed the Kremlin’s proposal as “yet another attempt by Putin to play with human lives”.
“Shahed drones in our skies reveal Putin’s true attitude toward Easter and toward human life,” he said, referring to Iranian-made attack drones used widely by Russia in the war to attack Ukrainian cities far from the front.
Firefighters work at the site of a garment production factory hit by a Russian missile strike on 18 April (Photo: Reuters)Kyiv official Andriy Kovalenko also accused Russian forces of continuing to open fire on Ukrainian positions despite Putin’s proclamation of an Easter ceasefire.
“The Russians are trying to pretend that they are ‘peacekeepers’, but they already refused an unconditional ceasefire on March 11 and now are conducting an information operation, talking about a ‘truce’ but continuing to shoot without stopping,” Kovalenko, head of the Centre for Countering Disinformation, wrote on Telegram.
“This is all with the aim of blaming Ukraine,” said Kovalenko, whose centre is a body within the National Security and Defence Council.
The Russian Defence Ministry, meanwhile, claimed that its troops had been instructed about the ceasefire and would adhere to it, provided it was “mutually respected” by Ukraine.
Putin has proclaimed unilateral pauses in fighting in the past with little impact on the battlefield, including a 36-hour proposed truce for Orthodox Christmas in January, 2023, which Kyiv rejected.
Kirill Dmitriev, an envoy for Putin who travelled to Washington this month, posted news of the ceasefire on X, adding: “One step closer to peace” and an emoji of a dove.
The UK’s foreign office in a statement late Saturday urged Russia to commit to a full ceasefire in Ukraine, “not just a one-day pause”.
The Kremlin’s ceasefire proposal comes a day after Washington suggested it could abandon peace talks within days unless Moscow and Kyiv show they are ready to stop the war. Donald Trump and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio both said on Friday the US would walk away from efforts to broker a Russia-Ukraine peace deal unless there were clear signs of progress soon.
Trump had vowed to bring a swift end to the war, while shifting US policy from firmly supporting Kyiv towards accepting Moscow’s account of the conflict.
Last month, Ukraine accepted a proposal from Trump for a 30-day truce which Moscow rejected. The sides agreed only to limited pauses of attacks on energy targets and at sea, which both accuse the other of breaking.
Putin’s “Easter ceasefire” announcement comes a week after a Russian missile attack killed 35 people and wounded nearly 120 in the Ukrainian city of Sumy, including Christians heading to celebrate Palm Sunday. That attack, the deadliest against civilians of the year so far, spurred Kyiv and its European allies to press Washington to take a tougher line towards Moscow.
Donald Trump and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio both said on Friday the US would walk away from efforts to broker a Russia-Ukraine peace deal (Photo: AP)Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said this week that some progress on a peace settlement had already been made but that contacts with Washington were difficult.
Russia’s initial full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides, displaced millions of Ukrainian civilians and reduced frontline Ukrainian cities to rubble.
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Putin has said repeatedly that he wants an end to the war, but had not retreated from his initial demands that Kyiv cede all territory he claims to have annexed and be permanently barred from joining a defence alliance with the West.
Kyiv says those terms would be tantamount to surrender and leave it undefended from future Russian attacks.
Putin told Gerasimov on Saturday that Russia welcomed efforts from the U.S., China and BRICS countries to find a peaceful settlement to the conflict.
Separately, Russia and Ukraine both confirmed a swap of prisoners of war on Saturday, mediated by the UAE. Each released 246 prisoners, while a further 31 wounded Ukrainians were transferred in exchange for 15 injured Russian soldiers, the Russian defence ministry said.
With additional reporting from Reuters and the Associated Press.
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