One day after United States President Donald Trump announced that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin had accepted his request not to attack Ukraine for a week, the Kremlin claimed that such a ceasefire is in effect, but that the deadline ends on Sunday (1st).
“I can confirm that President Trump in fact made a personal request to President Putin to refrain from attacking Kiev for a week, until February 1, in order to create favorable conditions for negotiations”, declared this Friday (30) the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, according to information from the agency France-Presse (AFP).
The Kremlin and the White House did not say when contact between Trump and Putin to discuss the issue took place. However, on social media, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky suggested that, if the conversation took place last Sunday (25), the deadline of one week without aggression was not respected.
“There were no attacks on energy facilities last night,” Zelensky said on Friday. “But yesterday afternoon our energy infrastructure in several regions was hit.”
At a cabinet meeting on Thursday (28), Trump cited the “extraordinary cold” in the region as the main reason for his request, as Russia continued to bomb Ukrainian energy infrastructure in the middle of the winter in the Northern Hemisphere.
“[A conversa] it was very good. Many people said: ‘There’s no point in calling, you won’t get through [a trégua de uma semana]’. And he [Putin] accepted,” said the American president.
In March last year, Trump had already agreed with Putin on a 30-day ceasefire on attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, but the dictator reneged on the commitment and the Russian offensive on these targets continued in the following weeks.
On Tuesday (27), a Russian drone attack on a civilian train in the Kharkiv region, in northeastern Ukraine, killed five people.
