Russia's Three-Day Pause Was Hours Old When a Strike on Kamianske Killed Five

KYIV — The truce lasted about as long as it took to write down. Ukraine's armed forces were ordered to hold fire at midnight Saturday under a three-day pause that runs until 11:59 p.m. on September 8, an arrangement put together while President Donald Trump's envoys were in the air on their way to Moscow. By Saturday afternoon at least five people were dead in Kamianske, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, after a Russian strike on what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described as a civilian enterprise. Five more were wounded.

The casualties did not stop there. Three people were injured in Odesa. A 17-year-old girl was wounded in Mykolaiv. Two women were hospitalized in the Kyiv region. Ukraine's General Staff took the unusual step of clarifying that its own stand-down was conditional — that it had never been obliged to hold fire while Russian aircraft and drones were still flying, and that it was observing the pause only because Kyiv had agreed to give the diplomacy a chance.

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Moscow on Saturday for talks with President Vladimir Putin, with a stop in Kyiv planned for Monday to put Trump's proposal for ending the war in front of Zelenskyy. Russian state video showed Putin telling the envoys the situation they had come to discuss was "difficult." Trump, asked about the state of the negotiations, returned to a line he has used repeatedly this year: "President Zelenskyy and President Putin truly hate each other."

Zelenskyy said Russian strikes on the airports at Kyiv and Boryspil overnight were not incidental. He argued they were aimed at the runways American officials would need if Washington wanted to fly its own aircraft into the Ukrainian capital, forcing the U.S. delegation onto the long overland route from Poland instead. Russia's Defense Ministry said its air defenses intercepted 53 Ukrainian drones overnight, part of a campaign Ukraine has aimed for months at Russian oil refineries, pumping stations and logistics depots.

The pattern is by now familiar. There was an Easter truce in April and another in May, both announced by Moscow, both narrower in practice than they sounded in the announcement, and both followed within days by a return to the heaviest strikes of the war. What is different this time is the presence of the two American envoys on Russian soil with a written proposal, and a Ukrainian government that has stopped pretending a partial pause on strikes against one city amounts to a ceasefire.

Whether anything survives past Tuesday will depend on what Witkoff and Kushner carry out of the Kremlin. Ukrainian officials have said privately that they expect the proposal to involve territory, and that no version of it that recognizes Russian control over occupied land will get through the Rada. For the people of Kamianske, the diplomatic question is already academic.