The Kremlin has ordered its troops in Ukraine to hold fire for 36 hours on Friday and Saturday to coincide with Christmas celebrations for many Orthodox Christians, but said Kyiv must accept a loss of territory to have any hope of lasting peace.
Russian shelling of the recently liberated southern town of Beryslav killed a 12-year-old boy and his parents on Thursday, as heavy fighting continued in eastern Ukraine and Kyiv revealed that war had caused the national economy to shrink by 30.4 per cent in 2022.
The Kremlin said Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered a ceasefire from midday on Friday until midnight on Saturday in response to a request from Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and he asked Ukraine to give the same order to its troops.
Before the Kremlin announcement, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said the Russian church was a “war propagandist [which] called for the genocide of Ukrainians…Thus [its] statement about a ‘Christmas truce’ is a cynical trap and an element of propaganda.”
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Earlier on Thursday, the office of Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan said he told Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in a phone conversation that “calls for peace and negotiations should be supported by a unilateral ceasefire and a vision for a fair solution”.
The Kremlin did not mention the ceasefire suggestion but said Mr Putin “reaffirmed Russia’s openness to serious dialogue, provided that the Kyiv authorities comply with well-known and repeatedly voiced demands and take into account new territorial realities”.
Moscow says there can be no peace talks until Ukraine accepts Russia’s sovereignty over four partly occupied regions of Ukraine – Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – and its annexation of Crimea in 2014. Kyiv rejects this and insists that in time it will retake all its internationally recognised territory.
The Kremlin said Mr Putin also “highlighted the destructive role of western states in pumping the Kyiv regime full of weapons and military hardware and providing it with operational information and target designation”.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has spoken to leaders of several Nato states this week to press for more weapons ahead of what Kyiv says will be a new mobilisation drive and military offensive by Russia.
France announced on Wednesday that it would supply Ukraine with AMX-10 RC armoured fighting vehicles – sometimes referred to as “light tanks” – amid the continuing refusal of western states to provide Kyiv with heavy main battle tanks.
“France takes European defence support for Ukraine to a new level… This is what sends a clear signal to all our other partners: there is no rational reason why Ukraine has not yet been supplied with western-type tanks,” Mr Zelenskiy said.
Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg urged the West on Thursday to make Ukraine stronger on the battlefield so that it can ultimately secure a fair and lasting peace.
“If we want a negotiated peace solution, where Ukraine survives as an independent democratic country in Europe, the fastest way to get there is to support Ukraine. Weapons are, in fact, the way to peace,” he argued.
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He also warned that it was “dangerous to underestimate Russia” despite recent setbacks on the battlefield: “They have already mobilised 200,000 extra troops. In addition, we know that they can acquire a lot of new material. And perhaps most importantly, there is no indication that Russia’s ambitions have changed.”
Economy minister Yulia Svyrydenko said preliminary data showed a 30.4 per cent drop in Ukraine’s GDP last year, which she described as “its largest losses and damages in the entire history of independence [since 1991], inflicted on it by the Russian Federation”.
