Vladimir Putin has instructed his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, to introduce a 36-hour ceasefire along the entire line of contact in Ukraine from noon on Friday to midnight on Saturday, the Kremlin has said. Russian troops must hold fire for 36 hours to allow people “in the areas of hostilities” to mark Orthodox Christmas, the Russian leader said.
Putin’s announcement came hours after the head of the Russian Orthodox church, Patriarch Kirill, called for a ceasefire and a Christmas truce in Ukraine. In a statement, Kirill said he appealed to “all parties involved in the internecine conflict” for the ceasefire, so that “Orthodox people can attend services on Christmas Eve and the day of the nativity of Christ”.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior aide to Ukraine’s president, dismissed Putin’s calls for a temporary ceasefire to mark Orthodox Christmas. He said a “temporary truce” would be possible only when Russia leaves territory it is occupying in Ukraine. Other Ukrainian politicians said Russia’s offer of a ceasefire came just days after it launched a wave of strikes on Ukraine, including the capital Kyiv, as Ukrainians celebrated the new year.
Putin is “trying to find some oxygen” by floating a 36-hour ceasefire to mark Orthodox Christmas, said Joe Biden. “I’m reluctant to respond [to] anything Putin says,” Biden told reporters. “I found it interesting. He was ready to bomb hospitals and nurseries and churches on the 25th and new year.”
Prior to the ceasefire announcement, Putin told his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Russia was open to dialogue over Ukraine but Kyiv would have to accept the “new territorial realities”, according to a readout of the call between the two leaders issued by the Kremlin. Putin also “acknowledged the destructive role of the west, pumping weapons into Kyiv, providing information and guidance”, the Kremlin said. Putin and Erdoğan also discussed a number of energy issues, including the creation of a gas hub in Turkey and the construction of the Akkuyu nuclear power plant, it added.
Erdoğan told Putin during the call on Thursday that peace efforts in the Russia-Ukraine war should be supported by a unilateral ceasefire and a “vision for a fair solution”, the Turkish presidency said in its readout of the call. The two leaders discussed energy and the Black Sea grain corridor, and Erdoğan told Putin concrete steps needed to be taken to clear Kurdish militants from the Syrian border region, it added.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, also spoke with Turkey’s leader about “security cooperation” as well as the exchange of prisoners of war and the Black Sea grain initiative, Zelenskiy said. He added he was “glad to hear that Turkey is ready to participate in the implementation” of his “peace formula”, which he first proposed in November.
The first inmates recruited by the private military group Wagner have received their promised pardons after fighting for six months in Ukraine, Wagner’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, told journalists on Thursday. “They worked off their contract. They worked with honour, with dignity. They were the first ones. Nobody else in this world works as hard as they did,” Prigozhin told the Russian news agency RIA-Novosti, standing alongside a number of former convicts. Addressing the former prisoners, Prigozhin instructed them not to end up back in jail.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, Ukraine’s governor of Donetsk oblast – one of the regions the Russian Federation claims to have annexed – has posted a status update in which he says two people have been killed by Russian fire in the last 24 hours.
Overnight, Denis Pushilin, the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), has said that service personnel injured in the attack on the barracks in occupied Makiivka have been mostly transferred to hospitals within Russia.
Ukraine’s gross domestic product fell by 30.4% in 2022 – the largest annual fall in more than 30 years – because of the war with Russia, the economy minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, said. She said Ukraine’s economy had suffered its largest losses since it won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 although the fall was less than initially expected. Ukraine’s GDP had grown by 3.4% in 2021.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said France would send light AMX-10 RC armoured combat vehicles, an Elysée official said after a phone call between Macron and Zelenskiy. In a video address, during which he thanked France for providing them, the Ukrainian president said: “This is what gives a clear signal to all our other partners. There is no rational reason why western-style tanks have not yet been supplied to Ukraine.”
The provision of tanks may well be part of “the next phase” of weapons transfers to Ukraine, the UK’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, said after a meeting in London with Annalena Baerbock, the German foreign minister, on Thursday. Speaking at a joint press conference with Baerbock, Cleverly said the position on the provision of tanks is kept under constant review.
A wide-ranging public discussion is taking place in Ukraine over what to do with seven street murals painted in November by the British artist Banksy on a series of destroyed buildings in and around Kyiv. The conversation has grown urgent after thieves last month made off with one artwork from the town of Hostomel, about 15 miles (25km) outside the capital. It shows a woman in a gas mask and dressing gown holding a red fire extinguisher. She is standing next to a real flame-blackened window.
The US is not “hand-wringing” over the mass casualties of Russian soldiers in a Ukrainian attack reportedly using US-supplied artillery, a senior White House official said on Wednesday. After criticism in Russia over the use of US-delivered weaponry by Ukrainian defenders, including in the Makiivka strike, the national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, said Russia is to blame.
Biden said the US was considering sending Bradley Fighting Vehicles to Ukraine. The armoured vehicle with a powerful gun has been used as a staple by the US army to carry troops around battlefields since the mid-1980s.
The US is also looking at ways to target Iranian drone production through sanctions and export controls, the White House said. Washington previously imposed sanctions on companies and people it accused of producing or transferring Iranian drones that Russia has used against Ukraine.
Russia’s defence ministry on Wednesday blamed the illegal use of mobile phones by its soldiers for a deadly Ukrainian missile strike that it said killed 89 servicemen, raising the reported death toll significantly. Moscow previously said 63 Russian soldiers were killed in the weekend strike on Makiivka. Although an official investigation has been launched, the main reason for the attack was clearly the illegal mass use of mobile phones by servicemen, the ministry said. “This factor allowed the enemy to track and determine the coordinates of the soldiers’ location for a missile strike,” it said in a statement issued just after 1am in Moscow on Wednesday.
The Ukrainian deputy defence minister said significant Russian losses meant Moscow would probably have to announce a second partial mobilisation in the first quarter of the year.
Further strikes deep in Russian territory should be expected, the head of the Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, has told the US TV network ABC. He said the attacks would come “deeper and deeper” inside Russia, without specifically saying whether Ukraine would be behind them.
