At noon Moscow time (10 am in Italy) the Christmas ceasefire in military operations in Ukraine announced by Russia officially entered into force, which will last until midnight (10 pm Italian) tomorrow.
Moscow’s proposal for a 36-hour truce in Ukraine for Orthodox Christmas is “cynical” and is just an attempt by Putin to “gain a shot in the arm”: this was stated by US State Department spokesman Ned Price in a press briefing, reported by the Guardian. “There is no word that can better describe (the truce proposal) than ‘cynical’. Our concern (…) is that the Russians seek to exploit any temporary lull in the fighting to rest, recover, regroup and, eventually finish, re-attach,” Price said. The proposed truce should start at noon (10 am in Italy) today and end at midnight (10 pm in Italy) tomorrow, the day of Orthodox Christmas according to the Julian calendar.
Putin orders Christmas truce. Kiev, ‘withdraw’. A brief lull in the fighting – 36 hours in all – for the Orthodox Christmas, which falls on January 7th. This is what Vladimir Putin decided unilaterally, appealing to Ukraine to accept the suspension of hostilities. But Kiev has replied that there will be a truce only when the Russians withdraw, while US President Joe Biden has stated that it is only an attempt by Moscow to gain “some oxygen” to remedy the difficulties of its troops on the ground . The decision of the Russian president came after, in a telephone conversation in the morning with the Turkish one Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he had essentially rejected the latter’s request for a “unilateral ceasefire” – but longer than the short term Christmas – to encourage the search for a negotiated solution to the conflict, for which Ankara once again proposes itself as a mediator. For the umpteenth time, Putin has said that his country is open to “a serious dialogue”, but only if Kiev “satisfies known requests and takes into account the new territorial realities”. In short, if Ukraine gives up insisting on regaining control of all its regions: not only Crimea, but also the four that Moscow annexed last autumn after referendums condemned by the international community and which, among other things, Russian troops only partially control. And the head of the Kremlin added a polemic against Western countries, accusing them of playing “a destructive role” in Ukraine by continuing to arm it and supply it with intelligence information useful for its troops to identify targets. A few hours pass and Putin announces that he has ordered Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to implement the Christmas truce, from noon on January 6 to midnight on the 7th, accepting a request to this effect from Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, to this effect . At the same time, the Russian leader is launching an appeal to Kiev to accept the temporary cessation of the fighting, to allow all the Orthodox to participate in religious ceremonies. A pure “hypocrisy”, replies the Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, who a few hours earlier had also harshly attacked Kirill, judging his request “a cynical trap” and accusing the Church he leads of acting “only as a war propagandist”. “We cannot take them seriously,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba echoed. If Russia wants a truce, Podolyak insists, it has only one option: “to withdraw from the occupied territories.” But on the contrary, says the secretary of the Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksii Danilov, Moscow is preparing for a new escalation in February, when the first anniversary of the conflict will fall. If this were actually the scenario, Erdogan’s new peace initiative would start off decidedly uphill. Speaking of the conversation he had with the Turkish leader, among other things, Zelensky placed the emphasis not so much on a general solution but on specific issues, such as the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the exchange of prisoners and the development of the agreement for the export of grain. For the Ukrainian president, the good news of the day is new concrete military aid from NATO allies. Joe Biden and Olaf Scholz, during a phone call, agreed to send American and German panzers to Kiev. Berlin also joins the US in supplying effective Patriot missile systems. Meanwhile, while rumors of a possible visit by Putin to Donetsk, Donbass, on the occasion of Christmas, are chasing Russian Telegram channels, civilians continue to die under the bombs. Ukrainian sources report the killing of a couple and their 12-year-old son in a Russian bombing in Berislav, in the Kherson region. In the capital city, the death of a 20-year-old young man is reported, while in the community of Stepnohorsk, in the Zaporizhzhia region, two people are reported dead and three others injured.
