As a pair of overlapping ceasefire proposals aimed at pausing hostilities during Russia’s annual May 9 Victory Day celebrations collapsed into renewed bloodshed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has publicly accused Moscow of deliberately choosing war over diplomacy and the protection of civilian life.
The breakdown of the tentative truce talks has raised urgent fears that Ukraine could launch retaliatory strikes against Russian territory during Saturday’s major Red Square parade, which marks the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. The Kremlin had earlier announced it would pause offensive operations on May 9 in the expectation that Kyiv would match the gesture, but the agreement fell apart before it could take full effect.
“Russia’s choice is an obvious spurning of a ceasefire and of saving lives,” Zelensky wrote in a social media post Wednesday. He noted that Ukraine had previously committed to matching any Russian ceasefire over the Victory Day weekend, when millions of Russians gather for public commemorations across the country. “It is obvious to any reasonable person that a full-scale war and the daily murdering of people are a bad time for public ‘celebrations,’” he added.
Hours before Zelensky’s statement, Ukrainian officials confirmed that Russia launched a massive overnight drone assault targeting multiple regions across eastern and southern Ukraine, deploying more than 100 unmanned aerial vehicles. The attack came just one day after a wave of Russian strikes killed nearly 30 Ukrainian civilians across the country. As of Wednesday morning, Kyiv confirmed at least one civilian death from the overnight drone assault, with additional casualties reported after Russian forces hit a kindergarten in the northeastern border region of Sumy, killing the facility’s on-site security guard.
The chain of collapsed truce efforts began when Moscow first announced a unilateral ceasefire to cover its May 9 Victory Day parade in Red Square, one of the most politically significant events on Russia’s annual calendar for President Vladimir Putin. In response, Zelensky put forward a counter-truce, calling on Russia to halt all offensive operations starting midnight May 6. The Kremlin never publicly confirmed it would abide by Kyiv’s proposal, only repeating its call for Ukraine to pause attacks on May 9.
Zelensky has already decried what he calls Russia’s “utter cynicism” in calling for a ceasefire solely to protect its holiday celebrations, while continuing to launch deadly strikes on Ukrainian population centers. Frontline Ukrainian commanders confirmed Wednesday that combat intensity has remained unchanged, with Russian forces continuing infantry raids and assault operations against Ukrainian defensive positions across the eastern front.
“The enemy continued to carry out infantry raids and attempts to storm our positions,” an anonymous Ukrainian officer on the eastern front told Agence France-Presse. Since Russia “did not comply” with the Kyiv-suggested ceasefire, “our unit responded in kind and countered all provocations,” he added. Another frontline commander echoed the assessment, noting that combat intensity has held steady, and his unit is responding to every Russian incursion: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!”
Moscow’s defense ministry reported Wednesday that it had downed 53 Ukrainian drones between 21:00 Tuesday and 07:00 Wednesday GMT, a lower number than recorded in previous days. The ministry did not address whether any of the Ukrainian drone activity occurred after Kyiv’s unilateral truce was supposed to go into effect at midnight Tuesday.
The escalating exchange of strikes follows a deadly 24-hour period of cross-border attacks. Late Tuesday, Moscow-appointed authorities in Russian-annexed Crimea said a Ukrainian drone strike on the northern part of the peninsula killed five people. The attack came just hours after Russia launched one of the deadliest waves of strikes on Ukrainian cities in weeks, killing at least 28 civilians across the country, including 12 people in a strike on the central city of Zaporizhzhia that Zelensky said had “absolutely no military justification.” Zelensky has since called on Ukraine’s international allies to issue formal condemnation of the Russian attack.
In recent weeks, both sides have significantly ramped up long-range strikes deep into each other’s territory. On Tuesday, a Ukrainian strike hit Cheboksary, a Volga River city hundreds of kilometers inside Russian territory far from the Ukrainian border, killing two people.
The rising strike frequency has stoked widespread nervousness across Russia ahead of Saturday’s parade. For the first time in nearly 20 years, Moscow has announced it will remove all heavy military hardware from the Red Square procession, and has implemented intermittent city-wide internet shutdowns that will remain in place through Saturday. Zelensky has framed these moves as a clear sign of Russian weakness, saying “They fear drones may buzz over Red Square.”
Now in its fifth year, the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has evolved into Europe’s deadliest and largest conflict since World War II, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians confirmed killed. Diplomatic efforts to negotiate a end to the war have stalled in recent months, largely sidelined by growing regional tensions tied to the ongoing Iran-Israeli conflict. Moscow has set preconditions for peace that Kyiv deems unacceptable, including a demand that Ukraine withdraw all military forces from four eastern and southern Ukrainian regions that Russia illegally claims as its own territory.