Russian leader Vladimir Putin, following a request from the Russian Orthodox Church’s Patriarch Kirill, announced Thursday that he will order his troops to observe a ceasefire in Ukraine from noon on Friday through the end of Saturday.
Saturday, January 7, marks the observance of Christmas Day in the Russian Orthodox faith.
A top Ukrainian presidential adviser responded to the news by calling the move “hypocrisy” and requiring Russia’s departure from “occupied territories” for any form of truce to take effect. Many Ukrainians reportedly celebrated this past Christmas on December 25, the traditional date for Catholics and Protestants, to break from Russian tradition.
Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, seizing the Crimean peninsula and fueling an eight-year-old insurgency in the eastern Donbass region until last February. At that time, Putin announced a “special operation” to overthrow the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, on the grounds that the Ukrainian government was an alleged “Nazi” entity. The “special operation” marked the formal introduction of Russian troops to the Ukrainian war theater.
The current stage of the war has raged unabated for nearly a year. The Christmas truce, if observed and potentially elongated, could represent the first material move forward in resolving the conflict.
Russian state propaganda outlet RT reported on Wednesday that the Kremlin issued a formal statement declaring a truce from noon local time on Friday through midnight on Saturday.
“Judging by the fact that a lot of citizens who practice the Orthodox religion live in the embattled area,” the Kremlin statement read, “we call upon the Ukrainian side to proclaim a cessation of hostilities and give them the opportunity to attend services on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day.”
The statement did not make Ukrainian agreement to the truce a requisite for Russia observing it, stating only that Putin had ordered a cessation of hostilities.
Putin appeared to have responded to a request for such a truce from Patriarch Kirill, who called on both countries on Wednesday to pause the war so that Christians could attend Christmas church services without fearing for their lives. Kirill’s status in Ukraine is highly disputed, as the Orthodox Church of Ukraine split from Moscow in 2018 over what Kyiv claimed was undue political influence in the Russian church. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) is still under Moscow’s authority and operates as a rival organization in the country to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.
Kirill was joined on Thursday by an unlikely ally in calling for a unilateral ceasefire: radical Islamist Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan and Putin held a phone call on Thursday in which the former reportedly urged negotiations intended to definitively end the war, preceded by a “permanent ceasefire.”
“Calls for peace and negotiations should be endorsed by unilateral ceasefire and vision of a fair solution,” Erdogan reportedly told the Russian leader.
“In view of President Erdogan’s offer for Turkiye [sic] to mediate a political settlement to the conflict, Vladimir Putin again reaffirmed that Russia is open to a serious dialogue,” the Kremlin said in its readout of the call, “under the condition that the Kiev [sic] authorities meet the clear demands that have been repeatedly laid out, and recognise the new territorial realities.”
The “new territorial realities” Russia demands that Ukraine accept is a permanent Russian present on a substantial percentage of Ukrainian land. In addition to occupied Crimea, Putin “annexed” four other regions of Ukraine in September: Donetsk and Luhansk (collectively, the Donbas), Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. Ukrainian authorities have shown no willingness to accept the occupied regions as a legal part of Russia.
Russian news agency Tass also claimed that Putin spent much of his call with Erdogan decrying “the destructive role of Western countries who have been pumping the Kiev [sic] regime with weapons and military hardware as well as providing it with operational information and assigning targets to it.”
Zelensky has not personally responded to the truce announcement at press time. Top presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, however, appeared to reject the truce in a statement on Twitter shortly after the announcement.
“First. Ukraine doesn’t attack foreign territory & doesn’t kill civilians,” Podolyak wrote. “As [the Russian Federation] RF does. Ukraine destroys only members of the occupation army on its territory.”
“RF must leave the occupied territories – only then will it have a ‘temporary truce.’ Keep hypocrisy to yourself,” he concluded.
Podolyak had previously responded to Patriarch Kirill’s call for a Christmas ceasefire by calling the Russian Orthodox Church a “war propagandist” and the call for a ceasefire a “cynical trap.”
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