Three and a half days. That is how long the pause the Ukrainian army received as an order lasts - from midnight on 5 September to 23:59 on 8 September, combat operations are to stop. The order was confirmed by several brigade sources and an official from the security sector. What nobody confirmed is whether Moscow will respond in kind at all.

Because this is not a truce. A truce is an agreement between two sides. This is one side that stops shooting and waits to see what the other does. The difference is enormous, and the announcements keep erasing it.

The dates are not accidental. It is precisely in those days that American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are due to travel to Moscow and Kyiv. So the pause is scheduled around somebody's plane ticket - the military silence is timed to the diplomatic calendar, not to the situation on the front. Who is waiting for whom here?

What Kyiv has already offered

Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier that Ukraine would ensure the "normal functioning of Russian airspace" and would refrain from air strikes - with the expectation that Russia would reciprocate. That is a unilateral concession put on the table before anybody promised anything back. In diplomacy that is called a goodwill gesture. In negotiation it is called showing your hand first.

And the context in which this order is being announced is anything but calm. A few hours earlier a Russian drone hit the headquarters of the Ukrainian security service in Kyiv - part of the building collapsed, there are injuries. It is hard to find a stronger message that one side feels no obligation to stand still.

The question nobody asks out loud

Will the order even be carried out along the whole line of the front? A front hundreds of kilometres long is not switched off by a single announcement, and every commander on the ground has his own reading of what "cessation of operations" means when drones are flying in from the other side.

The Balkans know this scene by heart. A pause announced ahead of foreign negotiators arriving, a gesture from the weaker side, then a quiet return to the status quo while everybody pretends not to have noticed. We watched it in the nineties in text and pictures. A ceasefire that lasts as long as the visit is an old Balkan genre.

If Moscow stays silent until 8 September, this order will not be the beginning of peace. It will be a document about who was prepared to stop, and who was not.