In an unexpected attempt at humanitarianism, Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced an 'Easter truce' on Saturday, a unilateral decision to cease combat operations from 6 PM (Moscow time) till midnight on Sunday.
“Today from 18:00 (8:30 PM IST) to midnight Sunday (2:30 AM IST), the Russian side announces an Easter truce,” Putin said in televised comments on Saturday, in an interview with Russian Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov that was broadcast on state television. He added that he expected Ukraine to follow suit, and that this gesture would be a test of whether the “regime” there was interested in peace or not.
The Ukrainians, however, were sceptic, and quick to point out the irony of the situation: the fact that the announcement was made at the same time that an air raid alert sounded across the Kyiv region.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on X that the ceasefire was just “another attempt by Putin to play with human lives”, since “air raid alerts are spreading across Ukraine”, and “Shahed drones in our skies reveal Putin’s true attitude toward Easter and toward human life”.
Despite that, on Saturday, the two sides also saw the largest exchange of Prisoners of War (POWs) since the Russia-Ukraine conflict escalated to what Moscow had termed a “special military operation”, back in 2022. Russia’s Ministry of Defense said that 246 Russian service members were returned from territory controlled by Kyiv, while Zelenskyy said that 277 Ukrainian “warriors” had returned home from Russian captivity. Both sides thanked the United Arab Emirates for their efforts in bringing about the exchange, as per an Associated Press report.
In the televised interview on Saturday, Putin also claimed that Kyiv was guilty of violating a deal “100 times” to refrain from attacking Russian energy infrastructure, which had been negotiated with America's help. He commanded Gerasimov to prepare an “immediate response” if this were to happen again, which would be a violation of the 'Easter truce'.
“Russia has already declared and violated such ceasefires before,” explained Anton Gerashchenko, a blogger and former Ukrainian Interior Ministry Advisor, on social media.
Both sides continue to blame the other for ceasefire violations as the conflict trudges on. Amidst this political blame game, the Trump administration is considering recognising the illegally-annexed Crimea as Russian territory as a part of its new draft framework to broker a peace deal between the two conflicted nations by putting the war in stasis, with Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia continuing to remain under Russian control.
“Now if for some reason one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just going to say you’re foolish. You are fools, you horrible people ... And we’re going to just take a pass. But, hopefully, we won’t have to do that,” Trump declared, as per a Guardian report.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had echoed this sentiment at the Paris talks, where he explained that America's continued ceasefire support hinged on the question of whether the decision to resolve the conflict would be taken “within days”. “If not, we’ll shift our focus to other priorities,” he had said during the talks in Paris, conveying the Trump administration's urgency to solve the issue, given that the US President had announced numerous times during his campaign that he would end the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
However, what complicates things is that America's dipomatic concession would be a violation of the UN charter and the post-1945 consensus that countries could not seize territories by force. A number of other countries, however, maintain their refusal to recognise Russia’s illegal takeover, as of now.
