The Lugansk People's Republic (LPR) militia has said that the Ukrainian forces plan a provocation in the Donbass republic at Orthodox Easter on 24 April.
“According to information from our sources, the militants from Ukrainian nationalist formations are planning a bloody provocation on the LPR territory on Easter”, the militia wrote on its Telegram channel.
The militia added that the provocation will involve Tochka-U tactical missiles and multiple launch rocket systems, and that “the fire will target churches, temples and believers who will come to services”.
According to the militia, the goal of the provocation is “to accuse LPR militia units and the Russian armed forces of killing civilians who would come to the Easter service”.
The remarks came a few days after Mikhail Mizintsev, the head of the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD)’s national defence control centre, said that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) “is preparing another monstrous provocation to accuse the military personnel of Russia of so-called war crimes involving the mass destruction of civilians in the Odessa region”.
He said that “to this end, in the near future, they plan to switch the uniforms of one of the SBU units for those of Russian military personnel and stage a demonstrative execution of local residents”.
Mizintsev added that photo and video “evidence” of these false flag atrocities would then be published by Ukrainian and Western news agencies “for the immediate cynical promotion of fakes”.
In a separate development earlier this week, Ukraine agreed to a UN ceasefire proposal during the Orthodox Easter celebrations. This followed UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres's call for a four-day humanitarian pause in Ukraine beginning on Holy Thursday and running through Orthodox Easter Sunday, and appealing to the sides of the conflict to “open a window for dialogue and peace”.
The developments came after the Russian MoD rejected Kiev’s allegations that a Russian rocket hit Kramatorsk Railway station earlier in April as a "provocation". Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov earlier stated that the Bucha provocation was aimed at slandering Russia, and that Moscow has insisted on an unbiased investigation into the matter.
Russia launched a special military operation to demilitarise and de-Nazify Ukraine on 24 February, following calls from the Donetsk and Lugansk People's republics for protection against intensifying attacks by Ukrainian troops. The Russian Defence Ministry stressed that the operation only targets Ukraine’s military infrastructure with high-precision weapons and that civilians are not in danger.