Trump says Russia, Ukraine agree to three-day ceasefire, prisoner swap

Donald Trump said Russia and Ukraine had agreed to his request for a three-day ceasefire and a prisoner exchange, setting up a brief pause in a war that has repeatedly turned holiday truces into empty gestures. The arrangement was described as running from May 9 to May 11 and would trade 1,000 prisoners from each country, a large swap that could deliver immediate humanitarian relief even if it leaves the battlefield largely unchanged.

The timing matters as much as the terms. The ceasefire was set around Russia’s Victory Day holiday and Moscow’s annual military parade on Red Square, a moment when the Kremlin has framed wartime unity as a domestic display of strength. Trump said he hoped the pause would be extended beyond the initial three days. He also said the deal would include a suspension of all kinetic activity, while Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine had received Russia’s prisoner-exchange offer and that it had to be tied to a ceasefire.

The Kremlin later said the pause had first been agreed by Vladimir Putin and Trump in a recent phone call. That gives Washington a direct line into the diplomacy, but it does not erase the central problem: holiday ceasefires in this war have often been announced and then broken. Putin has repeatedly called brief pauses during the conflict, and Russian forces have largely ignored them, leaving the declarations with little practical force on the ground.

Military signals before the pause were already mixed. The Institute for the Study of War said Russia’s Defense Ministry had announced a unilateral Victory Day ceasefire beginning at midnight local time on May 8 and ending on the morning of May 10, and warned of a massive strike on Kyiv if Ukraine did not comply. That overlap underscored how quickly a ceasefire can become part of the propaganda war, with each side trying to frame the other as the violator before the guns even fall silent.

For Ukrainians, the brief pause offered a necessary respite after sustained Russian attacks, but Moscow continued to say peace remained far off. The prisoner swap may save lives immediately, and the ceasefire may reduce civilian risk for a few days, but the larger significance will depend on whether it becomes an actual opening for diplomacy or just another short-lived publicity moment tied to Victory Day.