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Iran’s central military command accused the United States of violating the ceasefire in the Middle East war with attacks on vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, saying they attacked US forces in retaliation.
The US “targeted an Iranian oil tanker moving from the coastal waters of Iran in the Jask region towards the Strait of Hormuz, as well as another ship entering the Strait of Hormuz opposite the port of Fujairah, UAE”, the Khatam Al Anbiya said in a statement quoted by state TV, accusing the US of also carrying out strikes elsewhere in the south “in cooperation with some countries in the region”.
Iranian forces “immediately and in retaliation attacked American military vessels”, it added.
Russian Pressident, Vladimir Putin declared a two-day ceasefire in Ukraine for May 8 and 9, timed to Russia’s World War Two victory commemorations, and within hours Volodymyr Zelenskyy responded with his own proposed pause — starting earlier, on the night of May 5 to 6, and framed in language that turned Putin’s announcement into a political rebuke rather than a diplomatic convergence.
The dueling ceasefire proposals capture the fundamental problem with where the Russia-Ukraine war stands more than three years into Moscow’s full-scale invasion: both sides can announce a pause in fighting without either side trusting the other to observe it, and the history of the past month makes that skepticism entirely reasonable. Russia declared a brief ceasefire for Orthodox Easter last month. Each side accused the other of violating it before the ink had dried.
Putin’s announcement came through Russia’s Defense Ministry, which posted the truce on Telegram and said Moscow expected Ukraine to follow suit. It framed the two-day pause around the 81st anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany — May 9 being Russia’s most significant national holiday, the day the Soviet Union signed Germany’s surrender in 1945. The ministry said Russian forces would take all necessary measures to ensure the safety of the commemorations.
Read also: Putin Warns About Unpredictable Course In M/East Conflict
It then immediately undermined whatever goodwill the ceasefire announcement might have generated by threatening to obliterate the center of Kyiv if Ukraine attempted to disrupt the celebrations. “In the event of attempts by the Kyiv regime to implement its criminal plans to disrupt the celebration of the 81st anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation will launch a retaliatory, massive missile attack on the centre of Kyiv,” the ministry stated. It added that Russia had previously been in a position to carry out such an attack but had “refrained from such actions on humanitarian grounds” — a claim that landed with particular bitterness in a country that has absorbed years of Russian missile strikes on civilian infrastructure. The ministry also warned the civilian population of Kyiv and staff at foreign diplomatic missions to leave the city in a timely manner — a statement that reads less like a ceasefire announcement than a threat.
Zelenskyy, speaking from Armenia where he was attending a European Political Community summit, did not receive Putin’s proposal warmly. He had dismissed the Russian truce initiative earlier as “not serious” before the full details were public. When he announced Ukraine’s own ceasefire, he did so on terms designed to expose the gap between a pause timed to a Russian holiday and what Ukraine has actually been asking for. “Russia had failed to respond to Kyiv’s longstanding calls for a lasting ceasefire,” he wrote on Telegram, framing Ukraine’s own pause not as a response to Moscow but as an independent humanitarian act. “Human life is incomparably more valuable than the ‘celebration’ of any anniversary,” he said.
