Vladimir Putin’s “unilateral” ceasefire declaration – a bid to use Easter as a propaganda tool – was a deliberate waste of time intended to shift attention away from the Russian president’s original sin.
That sin – better understood as an international crime that led to more crimes against humanity – was the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, and the 2022 attempt at a full-scale Anschluss, along with the mass murder and deliberate targeting of civilians that followed.
Of course, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, has been quick to point out that Putin immediately ignored his own declaration.
“The total number of violations by the Russian army of Russia’s own ceasefire promise throughout the day [Sunday] reached 2,935,” Zelensky said.
Meanwhile, Russia claimed that there have been 444 “shooting” attacks by Ukraine since Kyiv said it would also observe the “ceasefire”.
The real issue here is that Putin has got us all talking about who violated what, and in relation to which ceasefire: Ukraine had agreed to another one, brokered by the US, which Russia also agreed to but didn’t sign up for as the Kremlin wanted some tweaks.
The ceasefire of 30 hours offered by Putin over Easter should be extended in recognition of the earlier non-agreement to observe a 30-day US-brokered ceasefire, Keir Starmer and others have said. The vain hope is that a down-weapons agreement can be parlayed into a longer-term peace deal.
But Putin has amassed close to 70,000 troops on Ukraine’s northern border, and may soon launch a renewed assault to carve away (at least) the chunks of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces that Russia has already captured. He might equally use those forces to have a go at Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, a half-hour drive from the border with Russia.
Any ceasefire now gives Russian forces time to resupply and reposition. Meanwhile, Putin has tried to sucker America, where secretary of state Marco Rubio has said the US might “walk away” in a matter of days from Donald Trump’s efforts to secure peace.
Performative frustrations on the part of Trump and his administration over Russia’s real-world rejection of ceasefire terms can be bent into a new narrative, after the Easter “ceasefire”, that Ukraine has also been intransigent.
The Trump administration is firmly on Russia’s side when it comes to the peace talks. So a sudden offer from the Kremlin of a unilateral ceasefire will have been welcomed by the White House, and is part of the duet Putin and Trump are playing. Trump pretends to be frustrated with Putin, Putin strokes away the irritation with a gesture that has no material effect on the war he started, but which Trump blames on Joe Biden, Nato, Europe, Zelensky – anyone and anything other than Putin.
Trump and Putin are holding the discussions in the space they have created – where they centre on how much of Ukraine Russia will get, and how much of Ukraine’s resources America will extract.
Ukraine wants future talks about ending the war to focus on how to get Russia out of its territory. Europe’s main concerns are protecting Ukraine and developing the military capacity to scare Putin away from his oft-spoken desire to force former Soviet-sphere nations in Eastern Europe back into Russia’s portfolio.
That’s much harder to focus on if, as Putin and Trump want, diplomatic and political effort is diverted into quibbles over fake ceasefires rather than winning the war against Russia.
