But a day later, Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council announced that Russian troops had fired at Ukrainian positions at least 10 times. The ceasefire failed to materialise into anything substantive.

Russia has repeatedly painted modern Ukraine as a Nazi state, in a crass distortion of history. Putin had already seized Ukraine's Crimean peninsula eight years earlier, after a revolution that ousted Ukraine's pro-Russian president and replaced him with a more pro-Western government.