- The temporary ceasefire should last 32 hours.
- Kyiv warns that it will respond if Russia violates it.
- UAE helps mediate prisoner exchange, Russian ministry says.
kyiv: A temporary truce between Russia and Ukraine came into effect on Saturday, with kyiv warning it would respond “immediately” if Russia violated it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the ceasefire on Thursday to coincide with Orthodox Easter, more than a week after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky first made the proposal.
Both parties have agreed to respect it.
The ceasefire should last 32 hours, from 4:00 p.m. (1:00 p.m. GMT) on Saturday until the end of the day on Sunday, according to the Kremlin.
“Ukraine will respect the ceasefire and respond strictly in the same way. The absence of Russian attacks in the air, on land and at sea will mean that there will be no response from our side,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a post on X.
The Ukrainian military said it was ready to respond “immediately” if Russia violated it.
Hours before the truce began, Russia launched at least 160 drones into Ukraine, killing four people in the country’s east and south and wounding dozens more, Ukrainian authorities said.
The southern region of Odessa was among the worst affected, with authorities reporting two deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure.
A wave of Ukrainian drones caused a fire at an oil depot and damaged apartment buildings in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region, authorities said.
Four people were killed in Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Kherson regions, according to Russian-installed officials.
Ukrainians have expressed skepticism about whether the truce will hold.
The two sides held a ceasefire during Orthodox Easter last year, but both accused the other of hundreds of violations.
Despite tensions over the truce, the warring sides exchanged 175 prisoners of war each on Saturday, according to officials.
The United Arab Emirates helped mediate the exchange, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
Prisoner of war exchanges are one of the few areas of cooperation between warring sides.
Stagnant diplomacy
U.S.-led talks aimed at ending the four-year conflict have stalled in recent weeks because of the war in the Middle East.
Even before the Iran war, progress toward a peace deal in Ukraine had been slow, due to differences over the territory issue.
Ukraine has proposed freezing the conflict on the current front lines.
But Russia has rejected this, saying it wants Ukraine to give up all the territory in the Donetsk region it currently controls, a demand kyiv considers unacceptable.
Several rounds of U.S.-led talks have failed to bring the warring parties closer to an agreement.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that Russia had previously discussed the ceasefire with Ukraine or the United States and said it was not linked to negotiations to end the war.
The war has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions to flee their homes, making it the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II.
After four years, the fighting on the front has practically reached a stalemate.
Russia has made small territorial gains at great cost.
But kyiv recently managed to push back in the southeast and Russian advances have been slowing since late 2025, according to the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
Aside from Ukrainian counterattacks, analysts attributed the slowdown to Russia being banned from using SpaceX’s Starlink satellites and Moscow’s own efforts to block the Telegram messaging app.
But the situation is unfavorable for Ukraine in the Donetsk region, near the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, according to ISW.
Moscow occupies just over 19 percent of Ukraine, most of which was taken during the first weeks of the conflict.
