Air-raid sirens have been heard across parts of Ukraine after Kyiv rejected Vladimir Putin’s call for a Christmas truce.
Russia’s president had ordered his defence minister to impose a 36-hour ceasefire on the Ukrainian frontline, to coincide with the Russian Orthodox Christmas.
Putin asked Ukraine to reciprocate so that the “large numbers of Orthodox believers [who] reside in areas where hostilities are taking place” could celebrate Christmas Eve on Friday and Christmas Day on Saturday.
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However, Kyiv quickly rejected the request. Ukraine’s presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, said there could be no “temporary truce” and called the proposal a “propaganda gesture” and a “trivial ploy”.
In his nightly video address, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russia wanted to use the truce as a cover to stop Ukrainian advances in the eastern Donbas region.
US President Joe Biden also expressed doubts, telling the media that he was “reluctant to respond to anything Putin says”. He added that he found the proposal “interesting” because Putin “was ready to bomb hospitals and nurseries and churches on the 25th and New Year’s”.
At various points during the war, Russian authorities have ordered “limited, local truces to allow civilian evacuations or other humanitarian purposes”, wrote Andrew Meldrum for Associated Press, but yesterday’s order was “the first time Putin has directed his troops to observe a cease-fire throughout Ukraine”.
However, added Meldrum, it “wasn’t clear whether hostilities would actually pause on the 1,100-kilometer (684-mile) front line or elsewhere”.
CNN said that fighting had continued this morning and that it had “witnessed incoming and outgoing artillery fire near the front line around Bakhmut on Friday”. Air-raid alerts were reported in parts of Ukraine, said The Guardian, just hours after Russia declared the temporary ceasefire.
The wording and sudden nature of the proposed ceasefire fuelled suspicion, with analysts “suggesting that the cease-fire was an attempt by Putin to further damage Ukraine’s reputation at home and maybe even abroad”, said NBC News.
“Putin cannot reasonably expect Ukraine to meet the terms of this suddenly declared ceasefire and may have called for the ceasefire to frame Ukraine as unaccommodating and unwilling to take the necessary steps toward negotiations,” the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, argued.
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