Opening ceremony for the Russian armed forces’ main cathedral, by
Author Shakhov1986 icensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 courtesy of Wikimedia.

Vox reports that Putin’s proposed Christmas “cease fire” was a cynical propaganda exercise. Excerpt:

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a 36-hour unilateral ceasefire in Ukraine, timed for the Orthodox Christmas, a move that at least one Ukrainian official derided as a “propaganda gesture” that will likely do little to foster real negotiations or otherwise change the trajectory of the war.

Ukraine never accepted the ceasefire, but hours into the so-called truce, it’s clear how meaningless it was. Russia has continued shelling, as both sides exchange fire on the front lines in the east and the south.

Putin had ordered the Russian military to obey a temporary ceasefire “along the entire line of contact between the parties in Ukraine,” according to a statement from the Kremlin. The halt in Russian fighting is supposed to last from noon on Friday, January 6, until midnight on Saturday, January 7, in observance of the Orthodox Christmas holiday. The Kremlin cited a speech from Patriarch Kirill, the firebrand head of the Russian Orthodox Church who has been a full-throated supporter of both Putin and the invasion of Ukraine, as the reason for the decision. “As a large number of Orthodox Christians reside in the area of hostilities, we call on the Ukrainian side to declare a ceasefire to allow them to attend church services on Christmas Eve as well as on Christmas Day,” said the Kremlin’s statement.

A pause in the fighting after months of an increasingly bloody conflict would typically be a welcome development, but this announcement had largely been dismissed by Ukraine and some of its Western partners as an obvious political ploy. A top Ukrainian official, Mykhailo Podolyak, wrote on Twitter that the “Russian Federation must leave the occupied territories – only then will it have a ‘temporary truce’. Keep hypocrisy to yourself.”

Glory to Ukraine!