‘What ceasefire?’

Svitlana Avramenko stood in front of the sea of flags, each representing a fallen soldier, on Kyiv’s Independence Square. This time last year, she said, there were far fewer flags and photos of dead soldiers in the centre of the Ukrainian capital.

And the war rages on, with few in Ukraine putting any stock in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s declaration of a 72-hour ceasefire that supposedly began Thursday and will continue until Saturday night. “What ceasefire?” the 44-year-old Ms. Avramenko said Thursday afternoon, more than 12 hours after the war was supposed to have come to a temporary halt. “I don’t believe it.”

Mr. Putin’s offer coincided with the Kremlin’s plans to mark the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany with a giant military parade Friday on Red Square. The proposed pause in fighting has been sharply criticized by Kyiv, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky repeatedly insisting that a ceasefire should last at least 30 days.

Kyiv residents were skeptical there would be any pause. Denys Yanush, 15, said he didn’t believe Russia would stop attacking Ukraine for the next three days and that while he too wished for a 30-day ceasefire, he didn’t think Russia would agree to one. “We need support from Western countries,” he said, in the form of more military equipment, particularly air defence systems.

While Kyiv was quiet on Thursday, Ukraine said Russia had repeatedly violated its ceasefire in other parts of the country.

Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, the head of the press office for the regional military administration in the southern city of Kherson, told The Globe and Mail early Thursday that there had been fewer attacks in area. In the morning, he wrote, a single explosion was heard but no damage was reported. Nonetheless, Mr. Tolokonnikov said, Kherson was ready for an escalation “because we understand that the Russian dictator will continue to attack and cannot be trusted.”

Mr. Putin’s three-day truce was dismissed Thursday by Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Andrii Sybiha in a social media post as a “farce” and “Putin’s parade ceasefire.”

Multiple Ukrainian media outlets reported that Ukrainian troops along the 1,000-kilometre-long front line had been instructed to fire only when fired upon.

However, Ukraine said Russia had carried out more than 700 attacks between midnight, when the truce was supposed to begin, and midday Thursday, including 176 strikes using explosive drones and 16 more involving guided bombs.

Russia, however, claimed it was the Ukrainian side that had violated the truce nearly 500 times during its early hours, including an assault near the occupied Ukrainian city of Toretsk, in the southeastern Donetsk region, and a new attempt to enter the Kursk region of Russia.

While the majority of Russia’s military is deployed in and around Ukraine, Friday’s parade on Red Square is still expected to involve thousands of troops and pieces of military equipment. In the face of Western attempts to isolate Russia, the Kremlin says 29 foreign leaders – headlined by Chinese President Xi Jinping, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi – will attend. The heads of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two breakaway regions of Georgia that only Moscow recognizes as independent states, will also be in attendance.

Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi met Thursday in the Kremlin and hailed the relationship between their two countries, which Mr. Putin described as having ”reached the highest level in history.” Mr. Xi praised their “mutual trust” and said Russia and China would continue to work together “amid the international countercurrent of unilateralism and hegemonic bullying” – an apparent reference to the multifront trade war launched by U.S. President Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump has also sought to push Russia and Ukraine toward a permanent peace deal. Though the outlines of the deal sought by Mr. Trump are largely in Moscow’s favour, they fall short of Russia’s maximalist demands, which include the demilitarization of the Ukrainian state and wide-ranging changes to its constitution. The Kremlin has recently stated that a peace deal needs to be negotiated between Moscow and Kyiv, not Moscow and Washington.

The war in Ukraine has complicated the Kremlin’s plans for its Victory Day celebration. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s plane was forced to make an unplanned stop in Azerbaijan after Ukrainian drone attacks forced the repeated closure of Moscow’s airports this week. Both Mr. Vucic and Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico had to take the longer, southern route after Poland, Lithuania and Latvia refused to allow their planes to fly over their countries en route to Moscow.

Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuriy Ushakov said this week that soldiers from 13 countries – including China, Egypt, Belarus and Vietnam – are expected to take part in the parade on Red Square. Ukraine’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said it was “unacceptable” and an “outrage” for foreign troops to march alongside the army that was attacking their country. “These people are not liberators of Europe, they are occupants and war criminals. To march side by side with them is to share responsibility for the blood of murdered Ukrainian children, civilians and military, not to honour the victory over Nazism,” the ministry said in a statement Tuesday.

Curiously, North Korea, which has close ties to Moscow and is the only foreign country to deploy troops – an estimated 12,000 – to join the war against Ukraine, is not scheduled to take part in the parade. Nor is North Korean leader Kim Jong-un among the expected dignitaries.

Victory Day has become an instrument of national unity since Mr. Putin’s rise to power in 2000, with the country’s post-Soviet identity and politics built around the commemoration of the 14 million Russian civilians and soldiers who died during the Second World War.

Overall Soviet losses were closer to 27 million – including almost seven million Ukrainians, most of whom were civilians.

Victory Day was a major Ukrainian holiday until the start of the Russian invasion. In 2023, Mr. Zelensky signed a decree moving the holiday to May 8 and renaming it the Day of Remembrance and Victory over Nazism.

He wrote on social media this week that only tougher sanctions on Russia and more military support for Ukraine would force Mr. Putin to end the invasion he launched in February, 2022. “Putin is eager to showboat his tanks at the parade, but what he should be thinking about is how to end his war.”

With reporting by Kateryna Hatsenko in Kyiv