U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres requested a four-day ceasefire in Ukraine and Russia for the Orthodox Holy Week, which begins Thursday and ends with the Orthodox Easter on Sunday.
Easter is being overshadowed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and religious and world leaders need to join the call for a pause in the violence during one of Christianity’s most important holidays, Guterres said in remarks Tuesday.
“Easter is a season for renewal, resurrection, and hope. But this year, Holy Week is being observed under the cloud of a war that represents the total negation of the Easter message,” Guterres said. “The four-day Easter period should be a moment to unite around saving lives and furthering dialogue to end the suffering in Ukraine.”
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Both Russia and Ukraine have a large Orthodox population. In 2015, the Pew Research Center said in a survey that 71% of Russians and 78% of Ukrainians identify as Orthodox.
The Rev. Ioan Sauca, an Orthodox priest from Romania who is the acting general secretary of the World Council of Churches, pleaded with Russian Orthodox Bishop Kirill to use his authority as the head of the Russian Orthodox Church to demand a ceasefire for a few hours so Orthodox Christians in both countries could celebrate Easter.
“It is well known that for Eastern Christianity this day has a special resonance and importance,” Sauca said. “The history reminds us that even in the most difficult moments of persecutions, wars and sufferings, nobody could stop the faithful singing and proclaiming boldly the Easter hymn which affirms the victory of life over death, of light over the darkness, of freedom over tyranny.”
Sauca referenced World War I in his request, reflecting on how the fighting stopped briefly so soldiers could celebrate and share the holiday with each other.
The head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, Metropolitan Epifaniy, urged churches in Ukraine to cancel night services Sunday or move them into daylight hours and said the faithful could still watch services online or attend the earlier service, Reuters reported.
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The Kremlin rejected Guterres’s temporary ceasefire plea.
Calls to establish humanitarian ceasefires were “insincere, and in practice, they merely point to an aspiration to provide Kyiv nationalists breathing room to regroup and receive more drones, more antitank missiles and more [man-portable air-defense systems],” Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, told the Security Council, according to the New York Times.
An estimated 12 million Ukrainians in the country are in need of humanitarian aid, according to Guterres, with numbers expected to rise to 15 million, approximately 40% of the current Ukrainian population.
Russia initiated the invasion of Ukraine at the end of February after spending months building up troops along its border. A second phase of the invasion began Monday when Russia started fighting in the country’s eastern Donbas region.
