Residents evacuated from the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky crossed into Ukrainian-held territory on Saturday, ending a long detour through Crimea, southern Russia and Belarus that became possible only after a local ceasefire mediated by first lady Melania Trump.
The convoy left Oleshky on Friday for the southern Russian city of Anapa, where evacuees boarded flights to Gomel in Belarus before buses carried them across the border into Ukraine's Chernihiv region. Ukrainian positions lie only about 5 kilometers from the city, but the bridges over the Dnipro have been destroyed and the routes out had been mined and exposed to drone attacks, which had made leaving on foot extremely dangerous.
President Volodymyr Zelensky announced their arrival on Saturday, saying the citizens of Oleshky had crossed the border and that "all of them will receive the assistance they need." He thanked the first lady for her efforts to broker the truce and credited Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine's human rights ombudsman, and his team with helping move people to safety. Melania Trump answered with a post of her own: "Oleshky proves we can raise humanity above war."
Lubinets said the oldest evacuee was 94 and the youngest was 1. Some elderly residents were too weak to walk and were carried on stretchers, and families wept as they reunited with relatives they had not seen in years. Others waited at the border beside aid tents and volunteers from the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and World Central Kitchen.
The truce took effect at 3 a.m. Tuesday and is scheduled to run through Sunday evening. It covers the entire Kherson front line, the longest and broadest pause in fighting since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, and it has given the region its first days of peace in four years. The quiet allowed crews to clear mines from the road out of Oleshky and bring in humanitarian aid.
Residents had four hours on Friday to board a convoy of 25 buses with room for 750 people, accompanied by ambulances for those with limited mobility. They were given a choice of going to Ukrainian-held territory, going to Russian-held territory, or staying in the city with replenished food and medical supplies. Several hundred people are understood to have stayed. Ukrainian authorities have restricted disclosure of the number of evacuees and the crossing point, a measure organizers said protects those who remained and future humanitarian missions.
The first lady said in a Friday statement on the convoy that "all elements of the convoy, including the safe passageway in and out of Oleshky, was established through mutual agreement between Russian and Ukrainian leaders."
Russia's human rights commissioner, Yana Lantratova, traveled into Oleshky with Lubinets on Friday and said that "everything unfolded without any incidents." The two ombudsmen jointly asked the first lady to arrange such missions regularly under her coordination. Lubinets is the first Ukrainian official to visit Russian-occupied territory since the war began, and some Ukrainians objected to seeing him stand beside an official of the occupying power.
Before the war, Oleshky was home to about 24,000 people. An estimated 2,000 remained, many of them elderly, living without reliable food, water or electricity, and many survived by cooking weeds from their gardens.
The arrangement has not changed the wider war. The Kremlin said Friday that the success in Oleshky should not be read as willingness to extend the truce to the rest of Ukraine, and residents of Kherson told the BBC they fear Russia has used the lull to build up its forces along the Dnipro. Many Ukrainians suspect Moscow agreed to the pause to earn credit with the White House before next week's midterm elections, the BBC reported. Overnight into Saturday, Russian drones struck energy and rail infrastructure, leaving 280,000 households in the Dnipro and Kyiv regions without power, Zelensky said, while a Ukrainian drone attack killed two people in Russia's Bryansk region, according to the regional governor.
Pope Leo XIV, the first American pontiff, had also pressed both governments to allow aid deliveries and evacuations. Negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and the United States are due to resume broader ceasefire talks in Abu Dhabi in early November, after those discussions were suspended earlier this year because of the Iran war.