Putin announces new ceasefire but Kremlin hardens stance on annexed Ukrainian regions

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a three-day ceasefire in Ukraine at midnight on May 7 to mark the 80^th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany in World War II.

The proposed truce — which Kyiv’s Western allies will meet with skepticism — will run from May 8 to May 11, coinciding with Russia’s Victory Day celebrations, the Kremlin said in a statement on Telegram. While Ukraine has yet to respond, Russia threatened “an adequate and effective response” if Kyiv violates the proposed ceasefire.

Moscow also declared a temporary truce over Easter, but Ukraine accused Russia’s own forces of violating it thousands of times. Russia has long rejected a full ceasefire unless Ukraine accepts a list of maximalist Kremlin demands, including demilitarizing and ceding vast swathes of territory.

On Monday, Russia’s chief diplomat went even further, ruling out a peace deal with Ukraine unless the world recognizes Crimea and other occupied Ukrainian territories as Russian — a marked hardening of Moscow’s position shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump said Crimea would remain under Russian control.

Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s long-serving foreign minister,  told Brazilian newspaper O Globo that “international recognition” of Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, as well as Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, regions which the Kremlin partially occupied after its 2022 full-scale invasion, would be an “imperative” in any negotiations with Ukraine.

Lavrov’s remarks came days after Trump said that “Crimea will stay with Russia” and attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for refusing to ever recognize the annexed peninsula as Russian.

“Everybody understands that it’s [Crimea] been with them [Russia] for a long time. It’s been with them long before Trump came along,” the U.S. president told Time Magazine last week.

The U.S. recently presented a peace plan to Kyiv which would see Crimea given to Russia and American recognition of the occupied territory. Ukraine has vigorously rejected any negotiated settlement that includes surrendering land to Moscow, viewing it as a capitulation to an aggressor, though hopes have waned that Kyiv could retake the peninsula militarily.

The European Union has also refused to ever recognize Crimea as Russian. “Crimea is Ukraine,” the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said last week.

But on Sunday, following a brief meeting with Zelenskyy at the Vatican a day earlier, Trump appeared confident Kyiv would agree to cede Crimea to the Kremlin as part of a truce.

“I think so, yeah,” he said when asked by reporters if Zelenskyy would go for the proposal.