- Putin has ordered a 36-hour-long truce in Ukraine over the upcoming Orthodox Christmas holiday.
- The ceasefire will last from 12 p.m. local time on January 6 until 12 a.m. local time on January 7.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered a short 36-hour ceasefire along the entire front in Ukraine for the upcoming Orthodox Christmas holiday. If it is implemented, the ceasefire would be the first major truce of the war.
Putin instructed Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Thursday to introduce the ceasefire, which will last from 12 p.m. local time on January 6 until 12 a.m. local time on January 7, according to a Kremlin notice.
The Kremlin's announcement of the upcoming ceasefire came after calls from the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, to temporarily stop fighting so people could attend church services, state media TASS reported.
Kirill has been known to support Putin and the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. He previously said that Russian soldiers who fight and die in Ukraine are committing a sacrifice and will be absolved of their sins.
Putin's order to stop the fighting is unprecedented in the 10-month-long war in Ukraine that he started last February, but it remains to be seen if the truce will actually be carried out and, if it is, whether or not it actually holds. Some officials in Kyiv have already expressed skepticism.
"ROC is not an authority for global Orthodoxy & acts as a war propagandist'. ROC called for the genocide of Ukrainians, incited mass murder & insists on even greater militarization of RF," Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said on social media Thursday before the ceasefire was formally announced by the Kremlin.
"Thus, ROC's statement about 'Christmas truce' is a cynical trap & an element of propaganda," he said.
In a follow-on tweet, the senior Ukrainian official said that Russia "must leave the occupied territories," arguing that "only then will it have a 'temporary truce.'"
"Keep hypocrisy to yourself," he added.
Putin's call for the ceasefire comes after an outpouring of domestic anger and frustration triggered by a recent Ukrainian strike involving US-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) that killed scores of Russian troops in the occupied Donetsk region over the New Year holiday.
Moscow said in a rare disclosure of battlefield losses that 89 troops were killed, though Ukrainian and other estimates are significantly higher, and blamed the strike on cellphone usage by its own forces. The claim, however, has been met with pushback and criticism of Russian military leadership.
Some expert observers have suggested that in calling for a ceasefire, Putin may be attempting to avoid a repeat scenario.