Russian president Vladimir Putin continues to posture as a peacemaker – even as he pushes on with Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. He struck his latest pacifist pose on Saturday, when he suddenly announced a truce for Easter, which would begin at 6pm that evening and end at midnight on Easter Sunday. ‘For this period, I order all military actions to cease’, declared Putin.
It was a grand gesture, made without the knowledge of Kyiv or indeed many within Putin’s own administration. And it proved predictably empty. Within hours of the truce supposedly beginning, Russian forces were busy violating it. Late on Sunday, the Ukrainian military claimed that there had been nearly 2,000 cases of Russian shelling, over 800 of which involved heavy weaponry.
For their part, the Russian authorities alleged that Ukrainian forces had also violated the truce, even going so far as to claim they had deployed US HIMARS missiles. But this attempt to foist the blame on to Ukraine was not exactly convincing. Given the Ukrainian army’s recent struggles, from a lack of manpower to dwindling military resources, it had everything to gain from a short reprieve, and little to gain from breaking one. Almost as soon as Moscow announced the break from fighting, Kyiv proposed extending it for 30 days.
This was almost certainly a truce made and broken in Moscow. First Putin unilaterally announced it, then his forces promptly ignored it. He tried, once again, to give the impression of being the peacemaker, while continuing to act as the aggressor.
The Kremlin has form in this regard. It has repeatedly proposed and agreed to ceasefires throughout the conflict, only to undermine and break them. In January 2023, Moscow declared a 36-hour-long truce to mark Orthodox Christmas. The Russian military violated it in less than a day. Even the much vaunted 30-day partial ceasefire on energy infrastructure, negotiated in March with US president Donald Trump, has been continually breached by Russia.
Few should be surprised by Moscow’s Janus-faced conduct. It has not only been waging a war of neo-imperial aggression for over three years now – it has also been waging a war on reality. Lest we forget, Russia invaded Ukraine, a sovereign nation, with the clear intention of occupying it and replacing its government with one subservient to Moscow. Yet Moscow continues to maintain the grotesque fiction that it is in fact Ukraine that is the (Western-backed) aggressor in this conflict. That it is Ukraine, through its determination to stand up for itself and fight for its independence, that is the obstacle to peace. That it is President Zelensky who is the intransigent warmonger. Even by the standards of wartime propaganda, this is a bizarre inversion of the truth.
That said, Moscow’s peacenik posing serves a very different purpose now than it did earlier on in the war. At the start, Putin was determined to dress up his invasion as a humanitarian ‘special military operation’ designed to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians from Zelensky’s ‘Nazi’ regime – an absurd slur on the Jewish Ukrainian president. Then, as Ukrainians’ brave resistance forced Russian forces to retreat throughout 2022 and 2023, Moscow called for ceasefires and truces in an attempt to carve out opportunities to regroup and rearm.
The war is in a very different phase now. Russia is on the front foot as Ukrainian forces struggle to hold their lines in the east. At the same time, the Trump administration is aggressively pushing for peace on terms that could well be favourable to Russia. And so Moscow wants to push home its military advantage while placating the White House by seemingly pursuing some semblance of peace.
It’s no coincidence that Putin made his surprise Easter truce announcement just 24 hours after both Trump and US secretary of state Marco Rubio said that America would be prepared to walk away from peace negotiations in the absence of any tangible progress. If reports are to be believed, Team Trump had originally hoped to announce a permanent end to hostilities last weekend, when, unusually, both Western and Orthodox Christian churches marked Easter at the same time. No doubt aware of this, Moscow decided it was wise to once again pretend to Washington that it wants peace. And so it called this ‘truce’ even as it continued to shell and launch drones at Ukrainian towns and cities. It was little more than a PR move for the consumption of the Trump administration.
These are extremely dangerous times for Kyiv. With every passing week, Russia’s battlefield position improves and Putin’s hand at the negotiating table becomes stronger. There is no sign that Moscow’s harsh, maximalist demands have changed. It wants Ukraine to hand over the five regions Russia has annexed, but not fully occupied. And it wants Ukraine to demilitarise, leaving it vulnerable to another Russian conquest.
Zelensky will come under severe pressure this week when he meets in London with officials from the UK, France and the US. The White House wants a response from Kyiv to its peace plan in the next few days, which could include granting significant concessions to Moscow.
Putin is not really interested in peace, however. He never has been. His objective remains the same in these peace talks as it has been throughout the war – the subordination of Ukraine to Moscow’s will. Hopefully the White House will eventually notice.
Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.
