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Ukraine and Russia traded accusations of breaking a U.S.-brokered three-day ceasefire that ended over the weekend marking Victory Day, with both sides citing drone and artillery strikes and reporting casualties during the pause. The dispute unfolded as U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to the truce from Saturday through Monday, calling it part of a potential push toward ending the war and saying there would also be an exchange of prisoners.
Zelenskyy said in an evening statement that Russia was neither observing the ceasefire nor “even particularly trying to,” adding there had been no calm in front-line areas despite what he described as a lull in large-scale attacks. He said Ukraine had refrained from “long-range retaliatory actions” in response to the absence of large-scale Russian attacks, and he pledged that Ukraine would retaliate to any aggression shown by Moscow.
“We will continue to respond in the same mirrorlike manner, and if the Russians decide to return to full-scale warfare, our response will be immediate and significant,” Zelenskyy said. He also linked the pause to Ukraine’s expanding ability to hit targets far inside Russia, while the Kremlin continued to dismiss comments aimed at Russia’s May 9 parade in Moscow.
In addition to Zelenskyy’s comments, Ivan Fedorov, who leads Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region, said one person was killed and three others were wounded in the past 24 hours in Russian artillery and drone attacks. Fedorov said another 16 people were also wounded in attacks across other parts of Ukraine, according to local officials.
Russia’s defense ministry, meanwhile, accused Kyiv of committing more than 1,000 ceasefire violations, state media reported, citing a daily briefing. The ministry said Ukrainian forces had attacked civilian targets in several Russian regions and had carried out strikes against Russian military positions on the front line, while also saying Russia’s military had “responded in kind” to the violations it described.
In Russia-occupied territory, Vladimir Saldo, the Moscow-installed leader in the Kherson region, said two people were injured by Ukrainian shelling during the ceasefire period. The competing claims and casualty reports came as both countries’ leaders and officials continued to frame the truce as conditional on battlefield actions and negotiations.
Trump’s ceasefire request and his comment that it could be “the beginning of the end” of the war also prompted a further round of rhetoric from both sides about future talks. Zelenskyy, who earlier had said Russian authorities “fear drones may buzz over Red Square” during the May 9 parade, mocked the pause by declaring Red Square temporarily off-limits for Ukrainian strikes to allow the parade to go ahead, and the Kremlin dismissed the remark as a “silly joke.”
U.S. and Ukrainian and Russian channels also pointed to continued diplomatic activity around the pause. Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov said on Sunday he expected U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to visit Moscow “soon enough,” while also stressing that Moscow would not shift its demand that Kyiv’s troops withdraw from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
Ushakov said that until Ukraine took that step, negotiations would stall despite repeated rounds, warning that the parties could “hold several more rounds, dozens of rounds (of negotiations), but we’ll be stuck in the same place,” as cited by the state news agency Tass. The truce represents another attempt to create space for talks after earlier ceasefires, including ones during Orthodox Easter, failed to produce tangible results amid deep mistrust between Moscow and Kyiv more than four years after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.