Russia’s Easter Sunday Ceasefire: Less Shooting in Some Places for About a Day (2025)

A Kremlin-declared Easter Sunday ceasefire saw a moderate reduction in fighting across the front in Ukraine and temporary quiet in a few sectors, but by Monday exchanges of fire and attacks were as intense as ever.

Russia’s authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin on Friday announced that Kremlin forces would observe a 30-hour Easter ceasefire starting at 6 p.m. Moscow/Kyiv time (1500 UTC) on Saturday and effective to midnight (2100 UTC) at the end of Easter Sunday.

Ukraine’s Armed Forces (AFU) General Staff in a Monday statement said that, over the 24-hour period midnight April 19-20 to midnight April 20-21, Ukrainian forces counted 96 Russian ground force attacks directed against Ukrainian forces, and 1,882 attacks of all types by Russian troops against both Ukrainian military and civilian targets.

With a 1,000-kilometer front and more than a half million troops engaged on either side, the Russo-Ukrainian War in a typical day of combat sees around 150 Russian ground force attacks every 24 hours, and during periods of intense fighting between 200 to 250 ground force attacks, General Staff data published from 2022-2025 reviewed by Kyiv Post showed.

The Russian main effort on Sunday, as has been the case for more than a year, was in the eastern Donbas region Pokrovsk sector, where about half of all of Russian attacks launched on Sunday took place, a statement by Ukraine’s Office of the President said.

Secondary attacks hit Ukrainian defenses in the northeastern Kharkiv sector, the southeastern Zaporizhzhia sector, and there were exchanges of fire across the Dnipro River in the southern Kherson sector, official AFU statements said.

Russia’s Defense Ministry on Sunday evening, while the ceasefire still technically was in effect, said its troops had recorded 2,935 ceasefire violations committed by Ukrainian forces, mostly in the Pokrovsk sector and in border regions. Russian forces had detected Ukrainian drones operatining over Russian positions or over Russia-controlled territory “more than 950 times… in the past 24 hours,” that official statement said.

Both sides confirmed the rare appearance of burial and soldier remains details in no-man’s land in a few sectors, and even one instance of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers working together to unearth corpses.

Vladimir Rogov, a pro-Russia “war correspondent,” on Monday published video showing Russian soldiers waving two white flags and collectING what he called Russian soldier remains from an unidentified wood line he said was in Donbas region no-man’s land.

This April 20 video published by the independent Ukrainian war watch group DeepState shows Russian soldiers carrying a white flag purportedly collecting Russian soldier remains from no-man’s land, but – per that source – actually surreptitiously removing Ukrainian land mines. Other video released by the group showed Russian and Ukrainian digging soldier remains from a trench “in a forward sector.”

The Ukrainian war watch group DeepState published drone video it said showed Russian and Ukrainian soldiers working together under a white flag to recover soldier remains. Other video published by that group purportedly showed Russian soldiers improving fortifications under a white flag. DeepState said the content was recorded in the eastern Donbas sector.

Corpse transport and burial details from both sides also met and worked together to collect soldier remains in the southern Zaporizhzhia sector, the Russian war dead tracker group Gruz200 reported on Monday.

Battlefield reports from Sunday showed that soldier remains collection details were rare and that across most of the front most of the time the ceasefire was not observed. Some sectors on Sunday saw heavy combat, those reports said.

Ukraine’s 25th Airborne Brigade, a unit fighting in the eastern Donbas sector since the early days of the full-scale invasion, reported dozens of Russian artillery, mortar and drone strikes in its sector, with the heaviest weight of fire hitting Ukrainian positions to the south of the town Kurahove. According to that source Russian ground attacks of infantry and light vehicles seemed to concentrate on defenses around the villages Udachne and Uspenivka as in the past two weeks. The Russian assaults were repelled, a Monday morning battle update said.

Video published by the Ukrainian war watch group DeepState on Sunday showed artillery strikes geo-located to Uspenivka, but it was not clear which side fired their weaponry. The UNIAN news agency on Monday reported Ukrainian troops broke up a Russian assault on Uspenivka on Sunday.

Ukraine’s 28th Mechanized Brigade on Monday published video and a battle report of a Russian assault by infantry mounted on motorcycles in the adjacent Toretsk sector. According to that report, strike drones operated three unmanned aircraft units in the 28th Mechanized Brigade, and an unmanned aircraft unit flying for the adjacent 93rd Brigade concentrated drone swarms in the area and turned back the Russian attack with heavy losses in Sunday battles.

Video showed mortar rounds detonating in the motorcyclists’ path and bomber drones dropping grenades on fallen riders. Ukraine’s General Staff on Monday said the action took place as the 28th Brigade described it.

Viktor Tregubov, spokesperson for Ukraine’s eastern troops headquarters Khortytsia on Sunday called the level of Russian assaults in Pokrovsk sector “fierce” and said that Kremlin forces were by no means observing the ceasefire in his group’s sector. Ukrainian defenses were holding, he said.

Ukraine’s 66th Mechanized Brigade on Sunday published images it said showed Russian soldiers seemingly abusing ceasefire terms by driving into no-man’s land and attempting to drag out vehicles stuck previously in a bog. Brigade drones reportedly attacked the 10-man team and recovery truck, destroying it and inflicting casualties. UNIAN on Monday geo-located the incident to low ground around the Chorny Zherebets River, in the northeastern Kharkiv sector.

Volodymyr Saldo, Moscow-appointed governor of Russia-occupied territory in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, said that Ukrainian attacks in the southern sector were less intense on Sunday but Ukrainian drone and mortar strikes across the Dnipro River were continuing. Mortar rounds hit the village Aleshki, kamikaze drone attacked targets inside the village Golaya Prystan, and UAVs made at least six bomb drops on the town Kakhovka, Saldo said.

“It is important to say directly: in a number of areas, there is silence, no shelling. This means that even among the Ukrainian military, there are those who heard the call for peace and retained their humanity. But, alas, not all,” Saldo said in comments to local media.

The popular Russian milblogger Dva Mayora published a report backed with video which he said showed Ukrainian infantry infiltrating across the international frontier into Russia’s Belgorod region.

Russian artillery and drones wiped out that small unit and ceasefire violation inside the territory of the Russian Federation were real, Dva Mayora told 1.2+ million followers.

“Now it doesn’t really matter on whose order these [Ukrainian] storm troopers were carrying out the raid… This does not cancel the fact that the ceasefire failed,” a Dva Mayora Easter Sunday post said.

Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky in a Monday morning situation report said that Russian ground and artillery attacks following the ceasefire’s end at midnight had returned to average levels, with 59 Russian attacks recorded against Ukrainian positions over the past six hours, almost all artillery or drone strikes.