KYIV, Ukraine—It was a scorching summer day in 2014 when Artem Kravchenko and hundreds of other Ukrainian soldiers put their trust in a Russian promise not to open fire and retreated in a column from the surrounded city of Ilovaisk.
By the end of the day, Kravchenko found himself lying in a ditch surrounded by dead comrades after Russian forces shot up the column. With three Russian bullets in his body, he had to drink his own urine to survive.
“They started shooting from the right, so we went to the left and met another ambush there,” said Kravchenko, who was 23 years old at the time. “They were just shooting up everything from all sides.”
Experiences like these during the dozens of cease-fires that have come and gone in Russia’s 11-year war against this country are why many Ukrainians have little faith in the latest efforts, spearheaded by President Trump , to halt fighting .
Artem Kravchenko recovering in a hospital in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Photo: Alan Cullison/WSJ
The Russians “gave us a clear signal that they can’t be trusted,” said Taras Samchuk , who also escaped Ilovaisk that day and is now a reserve medical officer.
In the past, Russian President Vladimir Putin has used any pause as a pit stop on the way toward his ultimate goal: taking control of Ukraine. During earlier cease-fires, Moscow reinforced Russian paramilitaries, sought to extract political concessions from Ukraine and the West, or simply continued shooting and killing Ukrainians while Kyiv’s army was held back by Western calls for restraint.
U.S. officials will meet separately in Saudi Arabia this week with Russian and Ukrainian teams to discuss the technical details of a partial cease-fire agreed in calls with Trump. Both sides said they were prepared to halt attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure.
After the call between Trump and Putin on Tuesday, the Kremlin laid out sweeping conditions for a full cease-fire, including a halt to Western provision of weapons and intelligence to Kyiv and an end to Ukrainian mobilization. Ukraine immediately rejected the proposals as aimed at leaving it vulnerable to further attacks.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday that any cease-fire needs to be backed by security guarantees for Ukraine from its Western allies. “Otherwise, Putin will come again with war,” he said.
For Russia, “a cease-fire is a chance for a timeout,” said Gen. Viktor Muzhenko , who was Ukraine’s top military commander from 2014 to 2019. “Their conditions are for the weakening of the Ukrainian army, while the Russian side will mobilize and increase the production of weapons.”
A poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology published earlier this month showed that 66% of Ukrainians believe that Russia’s aim is to destroy the Ukrainian state, while 87% believe Russia doesn’t want to stop in occupied areas and will try to grab more Ukrainian land.
It was spring 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and then sent paramilitaries into eastern Ukraine. Ukraine’s army fought back, but by June European leaders pressed Ukraine’s then-president to declare a cease-fire and open talks with the militants.
Russia used a break in fighting that month to strengthen the paramilitaries with more men and weapons to shore up their position, former Ukrainian officials recalled. Paramilitaries also launched a surprise assault using tanks and armored vehicles against a Ukrainian checkpoint near the occupied city of Slovyansk, killing four Ukrainian soldiers.
A monitoring mission by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was set up that logged repeated violations by Russia but couldn’t do anything to stop them.
Vladyslav Seleznev , a former military spokesman who is now a reserve officer, said none of the 25 cease-fires during the first phase of the war lasted more than a day. “That’s why I’m highly skeptical that this cease-fire can happen this time,” he said.
Fueling that skepticism are two notorious cases when Russia broke pledges to stop firing.
In late summer 2014, Russia covertly deployed its army to Ukraine’s eastern city of Ilovaisk, where it surrounded hundreds of Ukrainian troops. Ukrainian and Russian military commanders negotiated a so-called green corridor to allow the Ukrainians to pull out unharmed, and Putin put out a statement early on Aug. 29 saying he endorsed the move “to avoid needless losses.”
After the columns started moving that morning the first line of Russian soldiers waved what Ukrainians said appeared to be a greeting. Samchuk saw a Ukrainian soldier point at his Kalashnikov assault rifle to ask if they could proceed without being fired upon, and a Russian soldier made a cross with his arms, seemingly to indicate they wouldn’t shoot.
Less than a mile down the road, the next line of Russians opened fire.
Kravchenko still has flashbacks to the bus he was traveling in, with bullets whistling through the sides and windows and the dead body of the driver slumped on the steering wheel.
Samchuk, then a combat medic, survived as he was in an armored vehicle that quickly slipped into a field of tall sunflowers when the shooting started and couldn’t be seen by the Russians.
In the end, 366 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and 429 wounded, according to an official toll by Ukraine’s military prosecutor. Ukraine agreed to a full cease-fire that handed political concessions to separatist authorities in Ukraine’s east installed by Moscow.
Despite the cease-fire, Russian forces went back on the offensive that winter, seizing more territory and closing in on the city of Debaltseve, a key transport hub in the region.
At talks in February 2015 in Minsk in Belarus, Putin told Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and German and French leaders that Ukrainians in Debaltseve were surrounded, in what looked like an attempt to force his conditions for a cease-fire. Believing this wasn’t the case, Poroshenko called Muzhenko, Ukraine’s top military commander at the time, to find a way to prove it. Muzhenko had an officer enter Debaltseve, take a photograph outside the main post office to prove he was in the city center and send it to Minsk.
A cease-fire was eventually agreed, and artillery fell silent just after midnight on Feb. 15, recalled Lt. Col. Yuriy Brekharya , who was stationed on the edge of the city. Just after dawn the next morning, though, Russian artillery began firing again. Russian infantry advanced into the city, no longer impeded by Ukrainian big guns, which weren’t firing back, Brekharya recalled.
Three days later, Ukraine retreated from the city.
“Every time it’s the same picture,” said Brekharya, who is now fighting on the southern front. “As soon as they announce a cease-fire, the one who observes it is the one who loses.”
Lt. Col. Yuriy Brekharya, pictured in 2015, recalled how Russian artillery began firing again shortly after a cease-fire was agreed. Photo: Anastasia Vlasova for WSJ
Ukrainians say Russia appeared to be using a similar playbook in Kursk province this month, when Putin claimed Kyiv’s forces were surrounded. Ukrainian officials and soldiers in the region say troops are withdrawing and there is no encirclement, but Trump has latched on to the idea. He publicly appealed to Putin to spare the lives of thousands of Ukrainians.
“It’s pressure on our partners and an attempt to destabilize Ukrainian society,” said Muzhenko, the former top military officer. “You can’t rely on the words of Russians. All facts show the opposite.”
Speaking about the Ilovaisk retreat, Kravchenko recalled his comrade-in-arms Yuriy Matushchak , a history teacher who was wary of Russian promises of a “green corridor,” and warned that Russia’s history of invasions of Ukraine showed that they couldn’t be trusted. Matushchak was killed in the ambush.
Six months ago, Kravchenko’s brother was killed in action. Now 34 years old and working in agriculture, Kravchenko is watching warily as the front line moves closer to his town in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region. He believes the Russians want more than the land they currently hold, and even if a cease-fire is agreed would re-invade after two or three years.
“I’m 100% sure that these pieces of Ukrainian land that the Russians took won’t be enough for them,” he said.
Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com
