The temporary truce in Ukraine that Russia declared for Easter was a “charm operation” intended to appease US President Donald Trump, France’s top diplomat said on Tuesday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin unilaterally announced a 30-hour ceasefire on Saturday, and Ukraine said it was ready to reciprocate any genuine pause in the fighting. However, both sides accused each other of attacks that violated Moscow’s truce.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said Putin had declared the ceasefire to appeal to the Trump administration, which is pushing for peace in Ukraine and has threatened to walk away from its efforts unless there are signs of progress between Moscow and Kyiv.
“The Easter truce that he (Putin) announced somewhat unexpectedly was a marketing operation, a charm operation aimed at avoiding that President Trump gets impatient and angry,” Barrot told broadcaster FranceInfo.
Speaking on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for a 30-day ceasefire on long-range drone and missile strikes against civilian infrastructure. In response, Putin said on Monday that Kyiv was trying to “seize the initiative”, and that “we must think about it, carefully assess everything and look at the results of the ceasefire”.
The Russian leader has previously made a full ceasefire conditional on halting Western arms supplies to Kyiv and Ukraine’s mobilisation effort — demands rejected by Ukraine.
‘Red lines’
France, Germany, Ukraine, the UK and the US held their first joint talks last week since Trump took office, discussing how to end the war, more than three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Following that meeting in Paris, further discussions will take place this week in London between British, French, Ukrainian and US officials, including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
In his interview with FranceInfo, Barrot said European nations had told Washington which parts of any potential peace deal between Ukraine and Russia would be unacceptable to them.
“The only objective that concerns us is to defend French interests and European security,” Barrot said.
Trump said last week that peace negotiations were “coming to a head” and insisted that neither side is “playing” him in his push to end the war. On Sunday, the US president wrote on social media that he hoped Moscow and Kyiv would strike a deal this week.
Commenting on the purported Easter ceasefire, a spokesperson for the European Commission said on Tuesday: “We need to judge Russia by the deeds, and the deeds are that Russia continues to bomb and shell innocent lives.”
Less than 24 hours after the truce ended, Russian drones battered the Ukrainian port city of Odesa in a night-time attack, local authorities said on Tuesday.
A residential building in a densely populated urban area, civilian infrastructure and an educational facility were hit, and three people were injured, the head of Odesa’s regional administration, Oleh Kiper, wrote on his Telegram page.