At 22:00 Moscow time on 9 April, the Kremlin published a decree declaring a 32-hour Orthodox Easter ceasefire, effective from 16:00 Moscow time on 11 April until the end of 12 April1. Defence Minister Andrei Belousov and General Staff chief Valery Gerasimov were instructed to halt combat "on all fronts." Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told TASS the decree was not pre-arranged with Washington.
Putin's published Kremlin calendar for 3 to 11 April contains no phone calls with Donald Trump, no meetings with Witkoff or Kushner, and no bilateral Russia-US activity of any kind. A schedule can be edited, but not retroactively. Putin spent the week on Dagestan flood relief, a call to Chechnya's Ramzan Kadyrov, greetings to Russian space and nuclear anniversaries, and a meeting on artificial intelligence policy. The last substantive Russia-US diplomatic footprint was the sanctioned Duma delegation's visit to US Congress in late March, not any White House channel into this week's decree.
The Dnipropetrovsk regional governor reported two people killed and thirty Russian strikes on Friday 10 April, before the ceasefire formally began. Those thirty strikes fit a messaging exercise rather than a strategic pause. The previous Easter precedent, when both sides accused the other of breaking a similar truce, is not encouraging. What the ceasefire does, instead, is lay a quiet front over the day the next event hinges on.
