There was Easter but no truce on Ukraine’s frontline

In a wooden Greek-Catholic church on the frontline of a warzone, encircled by red tulips and military vehicles, the priest’s sermon is woven through with the war – just like the soldiers’ Easter baskets, packed not only with paska bread, pysanky and sausages, but also with drones, waiting to be blessed. ‘This drone will be at work tonight – enforcing the ceasefire,’ a soldier whispers to me, smiling.

The priest looks over a hundred soldiers in front of him, the church so packed that some must listen from the outside, and says that Ukraine will defeat evil, just as Jesus did. ‘The enemy is killing Him in our men and women, they are torturing Him in captivity, our mothers wash their faces with His tears,’ he says.

This Easter Sunday, for the first time in months, not a single air raid alert sounded in Kramatorsk. Vladimir Putin’s 30-hour ‘truce’, which supposedly meant a halt to all hostilities in Ukraine, held only away from the frontline.