CNN
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Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a brief Easter ceasefire in his war with Ukraine, a declaration met with skepticism in Kyiv as the war enters a crucial phase and US-led negotiations stall.

Putin said “all hostilities” would halt between 6 p.m. Moscow time on Saturday (11 a.m. ET) and midnight on Monday (5 p.m. Sunday ET).

“We assume that the Ukrainian side will follow our example,” he said, adding that the truce would help Russia determine how sincere Kyiv is about wanting to reach a ceasefire.

However, just hours after the announcement, Ukrainian officials accused Russian forces of continuing to fight. “According to the report of the commander-in-chief, Russian assault operations continue in some parts of the frontline and Russian artillery continues to fire,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an address on Saturday night.

Kyiv has responded to the truce declaration with skepticism, with Zelensky pointing out that Putin still has not agreed to a US-led proposal for 30 days of ceasefire.

“If Russia is now suddenly ready to actually join the format of complete and unconditional silence, Ukraine will act in a mirror image, as it will on the Russian side. Silence in response to silence, strikes in defense of strikes,” Zelensky said, calling for the Easter truce to be extended to 30 days.

“This will show Russia’s true intentions, because 30 hours is enough for headlines, but not for real confidence-building measures. Thirty days can give peace a chance,” he said.

The timing of the announcement also sparked some questions – coming one day after the Trump administration indicated it was running out of patience with Russia and Ukraine, and just hours after Russia’s Defense Ministry announced its forces had pushed Ukrainian troops from one of their last remaining footholds in Russia’s Kursk region, where the Ukrainians staged a surprise incursion last year.

“Unfortunately, we have had a long history of (Putin’s) statements not matching his actions… Russia can agree at any time to the proposal for a full and unconditional 30-day ceasefire, which has been on the table since March,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said on X.

The head of Kherson’s regional military administration, Oleksandr Prokudin, said on Saturday evening local time that a high-rise building in the Dniprovskyi district of Kherson had caught fire after being struck by drones. Russian drones also attacked the villages of Urozhayne and Stanislav, he said.

“Unfortunately, we do not observe any ceasefire. The shelling continues and civilians are under attack again,” Prokudin said. “This is another confirmation that Russia has nothing sacred.”

CNN has reached out to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment.

Air raid sirens sounded in Kyiv and several other regions soon after Putin’s announcement, with the city’s military administration warning of a Russian drone attack. Officials urged people not to leave shelters until the alert was over.

Andrii Kovalenko, who heads the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, a government body, said on Telegram at 7 p.m. local time that “the Russians continue to fire in all directions.” Moscow and Kyiv are currently on the same time.

Ukrainian troops at three separate locations along the front lines told CNN that as of 8 p.m. Saturday, there was no sign of fighting easing.

There have been no pauses in the conflict since Russia’s launched its unprovoked full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The sudden nature of Putin’s announcement and the short duration of the proposed truce gave Kyiv little room to prepare or maneuver. Many Ukrainian troops participating in ongoing assaults or reconnaissance missions would have been in position already, as any moves are typically made during the night due to the threat from Russian troops.

Ukraine has previously been skeptical about such temporary pauses in conflict, having rejected a temporary ceasefire in January 2023 believing that Russia had ulterior motives in calling for a stop to the fighting, such as using the pause to bring in more troops.

The 2023 truce was similarly announced by Putin to coincide with a holiday – this time with Orthodox Easter, back then with Orthodox Christmas.

Putin’s announcement comes at a pivotal time for the war.

As well as in Kursk, fighting continues along the eastern front line, which has barely moved in the past three years as neither side has been able to make significant gains.

While Ukraine has recently managed to push Russian troops back from areas around Toretsk, Russia has been inching forward near Kupyansk, Lyman and Kurakhove, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based conflict monitor.

Separately, the two sides conducted one of the largest prisoner exchanges of the conflict on Saturday.

According to Zelensky, 277 captured Ukrainian soldiers were returned home. The Russian Defense Ministry said it had swapped 246 captured Ukrainian soldiers for the same number of Russian troops, and that as a “gesture of good will” Russia also exchanged 31 wounded Ukrainian troops for 15 wounded Russian servicemen.

As with previous exchanges, the swap was mediated by the United Arab Emirates.

At the same time, US-led peace efforts are stuttering as Moscow continues to stall, having previously rejected the US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire.

On Friday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned that the US was ready to “move on” within days from efforts to bring peace to Ukraine, if there were no tangible signs of progress.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

CNN
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The timing, the brevity, the sudden, unilateral nature of it all. If Ukraine’s allies needed proof of Moscow’s wild cynicism when it comes to peace, the announcement of an immediate truce for Easter provided just that.

It came mere hours after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and his boss president Donald Trump said they would need in the coming days an urgent sign that the Kremlin was serious about peace.

For Russia’s proponents, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement on Saturday looked like a nod to Trump – but the sudden declaration is so riddled with practical flaws, before it even gets out of the box, that it is likely to be simply used by Putin to support his false notion Kyiv does not want his war to stop.

It will be a logistical nightmare for Ukraine‘s forces to suddenly, immediately stop fighting at Putin’s behest. Some front line positions may be in the middle of fierce clashes when this order comes through, and a cessation of this nature likely requires days of preparation and readiness.

Misinformation is bound to confuse troops about the truce’s implementation, how to report or respond to violations, and even what to do when it comes to an end.

It is possible this moment will prove a rare sign that both sides can stop violence for short period. But it is significantly more likely they will both use violations and confusion to show their opponent cannot be trusted. As of Saturday evening local time, Ukrainian officials said Russian strikes had continued in frontline areas.

The ongoing 30-day truce limited to energy infrastructure was born in conditions of complete chaos. The White House announced that “energy and infrastructure” were covered, the Kremlin said they’d immediately stopped attacks on “energy infrastructure”, and Ukraine said the truce started a week later than the Kremlin did. Its execution has been equally mired in mistrust and accusations of breaches.

Moscow made a similar unilateral declaration in January 2023, calling for a day of peace to allow Orthodox Christians to observe Christmas – a move that Kyiv and Western leaders dismissed at the time as a strategic pause for military purposes.

A genuine truce requires negotiation with your opponent, and preparations for it to take hold. The sudden rush of this seems designed entirely to placate the White House demands for some sign that Russia is willing to stop fighting. It will likely feed Trump’s at times pro-Moscow framing of the conflict. It may also cause complexities for Ukraine when they are inevitably accused of violating what Washington may consider to be a goodwill gesture by Moscow.

Ultimately, this brief, likely theoretical, probably rhetorical and entirely unilateral stop to a three-year war, is likely to do more damage to the role of diplomacy in the coming months than it does to support it.

CNN
 — 

A St Petersburg court has sentenced a 19-year-old woman to nearly three years in a penal colony after she was accused of repeatedly “discrediting” the Russian army, including by gluing a quotation on a statue of a Ukrainian poet.

Darya Kozyreva was sentenced to two years and eight months, the Joint Press Service of Courts in St. Petersburg said in statement Friday.

Kozyreva was arrested on February 24, 2024, after she glued a verse by Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko onto his monument in St Petersburg, according to OVD-Info, an independent Russian human rights group.

The verse from Shevchenko’s My Testament read, “Oh bury me, then rise ye up / And break your heavy chains / And water with the tyrants’ blood / The freedom you have gained,” OVD-Info said.

A second case was brought against her in August 2024, following an interview with Radio Free Europe in which she called Russia’s war in Ukraine “monstrous” and “criminal,” OVD-Info said.

During one of her hearings, the teenager maintained that she had merely recited a poem, and pasted a quote in Ukrainian, “nothing more,” the court press service said.

The anti-war activist has had previous run-ins with the law, having been detained in December 2022 while still at high school for writing, “Murderers, you bombed it. Judases,” on an installation dedicated to the twinning of the Russian city of St Petersburg and Ukraine’s Mariupol, the rights group said.

She was then fined for “discreditation” a year later and expelled from university for a post she made on a Russian social media platform discussing the “imperialist nature of the war,” according to Memorial, one of the country’s most respected human rights organizations.

Describing Kozyreva as a political prisoner, Memorial condemned the charges against her as “absurd” in a statement last year, saying they were aimed at suppressing dissent.

Prosecutors had been seeking a six-year sentence for Kozyreva, Russian independent media channel, SOTA Vision, reported from inside the courtroom. Video footage by Reuters showed Kozyreva smiling and waving to supporters as she left the court.

Kozyreva’s lawyer told Reuters they would likely appeal.

The verdict was condemned by Amnesty International’s Russia Director Natalia Zviagina as “another chilling reminder of how far the Russian authorities will go to silence peaceful opposition to their war in Ukraine.”

“Daria Kozyreva is being punished for quoting a classic of 19th-century Ukrainian poetry, for speaking out against an unjust war and for refusing to stay silent. We demand the immediate and unconditional release of Daria Kozyreva and everyone imprisoned under ‘war censorship laws,’” Zviagina said in a statement.

Russia has a history of attempting to stifle anti-war dissent among its younger generation. Last year, CNN reported that at least 35 minors have faced politically motivated criminal charges in Russia since 2009, according to OVD-Info. Of those, 23 cases have been initiated since Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Currently, more than 1,500 people are imprisoned on political grounds in Russia, according to a tally by OVD-Info, with Moscow’s crackdown on dissent escalating since the war began. Between then and December 2024, at least 20,070 people were detained for anti-war views, and there were 9,369 cases of “discrediting the army,” relating to actions including social media posts or wearing clothes with Ukrainian flag symbols, according to OVD-Info.