But shortly after the announcement, around an hour before it was due to take effect, air raid sirens rang out in Kyiv.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy dismissed the proposal as “yet another attempt by Putin to play with human lives”. As of 45 minutes before the truce was meant to start, Ukrainian planes were repelling Russian air strikes, Zelenskiy said in a post on X.

“They said they won’t fight starting at 6PM but they attacked us at 5:30, so clearly they were lying.”