According to the Kremlin, the ceasefire will last from 6 p.m. Moscow time (1500 GMT) on Saturday at midnight (2100 GMT) after Easter Sunday.
“Guided by humanitarian considerations, today from 6:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. from Sunday to Monday to Monday, the Russian party declares a truce of Easter. I order that all military actions are stopped for this period,” said Putin at a meeting with the general staff Valery Gerasimov, the Kremlin Le Cité press service.
“We assume that the Ukrainian side will follow our example. At the same time, our troops must be ready to repel any violations of the truce and the provocations of the enemy, all its aggressive actions,” said Putin.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the ceasefire “another attempt by Putin to play with human lives”. He wrote on X that “the alerts of air raids propagate through Ukraine” and “Shahed drones in our heavens reveal Putin's true attitude towards Easter and human life”.
The two parties exchanged hundreds of prisoners of war on Saturday. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that 246 members of the Russian service had been returned from a territory controlled by kyiv and that “as a gesture of good will” 31 injured Ukrainian predictions were transferred in exchange for 15 injured Russian soldiers needing urgent medical care.
The two parties thanked the United Arab Emirates for their mediation.
In another article, Zelenskyy welcomed the prisoner of War Exchange, saying that 277 Ukrainian soldiers returned.
In response to the announcement of the ceasefire, the Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrii Sybiha, said that kyiv had in March “was unconditional to the American proposal for a complete ceasefire for 30 days”, which Russia rejected.
The announcement of Putin's ceasefire comes after the American president Donald Trump said on Friday that negotiations between Ukraine and Russia “came to the head” and insisted that none of the parties “plays” in his thrust to end the three-year war.
