- A temporary ceasefire is to last 32 hours.
- Kyiv warns it will react if Russia violates it.
- The United Arab Emirates is helping to mediate the prisoner exchange, according to the Russian ministry.
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 to coincide with Orthodox Easter on Thursday, more than a week after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky first proposed it.
Both parties agreed to respect it.
The ceasefire is to last 32 hours, from 4 p.m. (1 p.m. GMT) Saturday until the end of Sunday, according to the Kremlin.
“Ukraine will respect the ceasefire and respond strictly in kind. The absence of Russian strikes in the air, on land and at sea will mean no response from us,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a message on X.
The Ukrainian army declared itself ready to react “immediately” if Russia violated it.
Hours before the truce began, Russia launched at least 160 drones into Ukraine, killing four people in the east and south of the country and injuring dozens more, Ukrainian authorities said.
The southern Odessa region was among the hardest hit, with authorities reporting two deaths and damage to civilian infrastructure.
A wave of Ukrainian drones started a fire at an oil depot and damaged apartment buildings in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region, authorities said.
Four people have died in Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian-occupied areas in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Kherson regions, according to Russian-installed officials.
Ukrainians expressed skepticism that the truce would hold.
The two sides reached a ceasefire for Orthodox Easter last year, but both have accused the other of hundreds of violations.
Despite tensions over the truce, the warring parties exchanged 175 prisoners of war each on Saturday, officials said.
The United Arab Emirates helped mediate this exchange, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
Exchanges of prisoners of war constitute one of the rare areas of cooperation between the belligerents.
Diplomacy at a standstill
U.S.-led talks aimed at ending the four-year conflict have stalled in recent weeks due to the war in the Middle East.
Even before the war in Iran, progress toward a peace deal in Ukraine had been slow, due to differences over the territorial issue.
Ukraine has proposed freezing the conflict along the current front lines.
But Russia rejected the proposal, saying it wanted Ukraine to give up all the territory in the Donetsk region it currently controls – a demand kyiv finds unacceptable.
Multiple rounds of U.S.-led talks have failed to bring the warring sides closer to an agreement.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that Russia had discussed the ceasefire with Ukraine or the United States in advance 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 come to a standstill.
Russia has made small territorial gains at great cost.
But kyiv has recently managed to retreat in the southeast and Russian advances have slowed since the end of 2025, according to the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
Besides the Ukrainian counterattacks, analysts attributed the slowdown to Russia’s ban on SpaceX’s Starlink satellites and Moscow’s efforts to block the messaging app Telegram.
But the situation is unfavorable for Ukraine in the Donetsk region, near the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, according to the ISW.
Moscow occupies just over 19% of Ukrainian territory, most of which was seized in the first weeks of the conflict.
