Both Russia and Ukraine on Monday reported airstrikes in their respective countries as an Easter ceasefire declared by Russian President Vladimir Putin expired at midnight without an extension.
Ukraine’s Air Force claimed on Telegram that the country’s air defenses shot down 42 out of 96 drones launched by Russia overnight and that Cherkasy, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kharkiv were the regions affected.
In the northeastern Kharkiv region, Governor Oleh Synyehubov wrote on Telegram that three separate missile strikes in the region’s front-line Kupiansk district resulted in damage to residential buildings.
Meanwhile, Dnipropetrovsk Governor Serhiy Lysak said that a fire broke out at a food enterprise in the city of Pavlohrad due to the drone attack, adding that damage was also reported in the settlements of Pidhorodne and Mezhova.
“Over our sky, eight Russian drones were destroyed by air defense forces and means. However, as a result of Russian aggression, an infrastructure facility was damaged,” Cherkasy Governor Ihor Taburets said.
Local authorities in Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Sumy also reported attacks in their respective regions.
The reports came as a 30-hour Easter ceasefire, which began on Saturday at 6 pm Moscow time (1500GMT), expired at midnight Monday without an extension, though both Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of violating the ceasefire since it began.
In a statement on X soon after the ceasefire’s expiration, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that Moscow violated the ceasefire throughout the past day nearly 3,000 times, with the largest activity taking place in the Pokrovsk front in the country’s eastern Donetsk region.
“Russia’s promise of a full ceasefire also did not apply to the Kursk direction,” Zelenskyy said, adding: “Overall, across the frontline, there were 96 Russian assaults, 1,882 instances of shelling on our positions, including 812 involving heavy weaponry, and over 950 instances of FPV (first-person view) drone use by Russian forces.”
The Ukrainian president added that Russia has yet to respond to Kyiv’s proposal for a full 30-day ceasefire after Easter, or to the proposal to extend the aerial ceasefire over Ukraine.
“The nature of Ukraine’s actions will remain symmetrical: ceasefire will be met with ceasefire, and Russian strikes will be met with our own in defense. Actions always speak louder than words,” he said.
RUSSIA’S REACTION
In a later statement on Telegram, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that its air defense systems downed 104 Ukrainian drones since the end of the ceasefire.
Claiming that its forces “strictly” observed the halt to hostilities as per Putin’s orders, the statement accused Kyiv of continuing strikes on its military positions, as well as on civilian targets in the border areas of the Belgorod, Bryansk, and Kursk regions, and Crimea, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014.
“A total of 4,900 violations of the ceasefire (by Ukraine) were recorded,” the statement said, further noting that the Russian side continued its military actions as part of its “special military operation” in Ukraine after the ceasefire’s expiration.
In this regard, the statement said that Russian forces inflicted losses on Kyiv’s military during offensives in Ukraine’s Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Sumy, and Zaporizhzhia regions.
It also claimed that the Russian military damaged the infrastructure of a military airfield, ammunition, and drone depots, as well as temporary deployment points of Ukrainian troops in 74 districts.