Stay informed of free updates
Just register at War in Ukraine Myft Digest – Delivered directly in your reception box.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his army to suspend combat operations in Ukraine during the Easter holidays this weekend.
Putin said a “unilateral Easter” ceasefire of 30 hours for “humanitarian reasons” on Saturday at a meeting with Valery Gerasimov, his first military officer, according to images published by the Kremlin. The truce had to take effect at 6 p.m. Moscow Time on Saturday and ends at midnight on Sunday.
The judgment, which occurs a day after US President Donald Trump threatened to end the peace creation efforts in Ukraine if rapid progress was not made, was the second time that Putin declared a complete suspension of hostilities since the order of the invasion of Ukraine three years ago.
Putin announced a similar truce to mark Orthodox Christmas in January 2023, which, by Ukraine, was a ploy to stop his advances against the Russian forces.
A few minutes after Putin’s announcement, Air Raid alerts were announced in several regions of Ukraine as well as in the capital kyiv, where the air defenses opened fire on the missiles and incoming drones, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian air force.
“As for another Putin’s attempt to play with human lives-at the moment, air raid alerts spread across Ukraine. At 5:15 pm, Russian attack drones were detected in our sky,” said Zelenskyy, following a report by Oleksandr Syrsky, the Case-En-Case of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
He added: “Shahed drones in our sky reveal Putin’s true attitude towards Easter and human life.”
While kyiv accepted Trump’s proposal for a 30-day ceasefire, Putin refused to withdraw from her maximalist requests to end the war.
“Putin has now made statements on her alleged preparation for a ceasefire. 30 hours instead of 30 days,” Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha said on Saturday after Putin’s announcement. “Unfortunately, we have had a long history of his statements that do not correspond to his actions. We know that his words cannot trust and we will examine the actions, not the words.”
“We want to see the Russian forces in fact cease in all directions,” he said, while urging Ukraine partners and the international community “to be vigilant”.
The two parties accused each other of having repeatedly violated a moratorium on the energy strikes negotiated by the United States in March. Russia also said that it would not register for a similar agreement on maritime security in the Black Sea unless a number of Western sanctions were repealed.
Putin said Russia expected Ukraine to “follow our example”, but told Gerasimov that he wanted his forces to be “ready to repel any violation of the ceasefire, provocations and aggressive actions of the enemy”.
He thanked Trump, Chinese chief Xi Jinping and the Nations of Brics for their efforts to find a regulation in the war in Ukraine and said that the cease-fire would show if kyiv was serious about “participating in peace negotiations aimed at resolving the first reasons for the Ukrainian crisis”.
The declared conditions of Putin to put an end to the war include Ukraine by abandoning four regions of the Southeast partially occupied in Russia and, in fact, ceases to exist as an independent state.
Russia has also demanded that NATO have almost all its deployments to the east of the Berlin Wall in the context of an agreement, which would rewrite the post-cold security order.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy said the Ukrainian forces continued their fight to maintain a narrowing land sample in the Kursk region of Russia. Quoting a report by Syrsky, the president said that kyiv’s troops had also “advanced and extended our control zone” in the neighboring Russian region of Belgorod.
Shortly before the announcement of Putin’s ceasefire, Russia and Ukraine have carried out one of the greatest exchanges of prisoners of war since the start of the total invasion of Moscow in February 2022. Zelenskyy said that 277 Ukrainian troops had been returned following an agreement negotiated by the United Arab Emières.
He added that 4,552 Ukrainian soldiers had been released from Russian captivity since the start of the invasion.
