As expected, Russia and Ukraine yesterday accused each other of attacks in the first hours of a ceasefire decreed by Vladimir Putin and which should last, in theory, until midnight today. The Russian president had accepted the call of the Patriarch of Russia, Kirill, to stop hostilities from noon yesterday, in order to celebrate Christmas Eve and, today, Christmas Day according to the Orthodox tradition.
This ceasefire was, however, unilateral, since the Ukrainian government never accepted it, considering it "a trap", as Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk warned yesterday, accusing Russia of nothing less than planning attacks against churches in the territories under their control to impute them to the Ukrainian forces, reported the Efe agency.
“Don't believe a single word from the occupants. If possible, avoid going to churches in areas where there is shelling, because the occupiers will use people as targets for terrorist attacks," Vereshchuk warned in televised remarks.
In any case, in the first three hours of the supposed ceasefire, Russian artillery fired 14 times on the Luhansk front. And, on the other hand, the Russian Defense Ministry stated that its forces were limited to responding to fire, specifically three Ukrainian attacks in Luhansk and eight in the Zaporizhia region.
Also in the first two hours the air alarm was declared in Kyiv. Apparently, Russian warplanes had taken off from Belarus, but such action had no consequences. Before noon there were bombardments in Kramatorsk (Donbass), which affected a building, without causing casualties, and in Kherson, where a fire station was hit.
A unilateral ceasefire like the one decreed by the Russian president was obviously not likely to be successful, beyond serving the Kremlin in terms of propaganda since the Ukrainians did not accept it. And neither could a pause of only 36 hours have any effective use in military terms.
Thus, at the point of the vast front of more than a thousand kilometers where the fighting is most intense, the city of Bakhmut, in the province of Donetsk, it was not expected that the fighting would continue. If on Thursday the Ukrainian high command reported that several Russian attacks had been repelled, yesterday the rumor spread that the Wagner mercenary group had launched an assault on the town of Soledar, about 10 kilometers to the north. So far the Russian forces had concentrated in the south and east of Bakhmut, reaching the outskirts of the city in a very slow advance that has lasted since last August.
Russian media echoed what was published by a military blogger stating that the Wagners were about to take Soledar, and it was his own boss, Yevgueni Prigozhin, who came out to qualify saying that “any premature information harms the offensive. And unbalanced statements published in the media lead to additional losses among our units."
Coinciding with the Soledar rumors, a White House official told Reuters that Prigozhin has a vested interest in Soledar: seizing its salt and gypsum mines. It is perhaps significant that in his message about the attack he said that "exclusively Wagner's fighters" were carrying it out. But everything is uncertain. Only the most staunch pro-Russian commentators yesterday took the assault on Soledar for granted.
While, in New York, asked about the day of the alleged ceasefire, the United Nations spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, replied that "our colleagues on the ground say that they have not seen reports of intense or large-scale fighting", although, obviously , UN observers do not have access to the entire so-called contact line. The White House, for its part, sees no prospect of a ceasefire in the coming months and considers it important to continue supplying Ukraine with military equipment.
Washington announced yesterday a new $3 billion military aid package for Ukraine. Within the package – which includes howitzers, mines and other material – there are “dozens”, according to what has been said, of Bradley-type armored combat vehicles for infantry, which move on tracks. The novelty is important because Germany and France are going to send similar vehicles, the Germans their Marder, some 40 units, which will take time to reach Ukraine, and the French as many AMX-10 "anti-tanks", on wheels but apparently in their version amphibian.
They are all light armored vehicles, not the Leopard main battle tanks that Ukraine has been unsuccessfully suing Germany for. According to the Financial Times, it was precisely the initiative of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, that ended up convincing the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to jump on the bandwagon, which he would have done after speaking with the US president, Joe Biden, and accepting also send a battery of Patriot anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dimitro Kuleba, congratulated himself yesterday for all this, stating that Ukraine "has managed to convince the allies that the time for the taboo on weapons is in the past."
