There is one thing Kyiv and Moscow have agreed on about Oleshky: the people still living there are running out of food, water and medicine. They have spent months arguing about who is to blame.
On Tuesday, for the first time, they stopped shooting long enough to do something about it.
A humanitarian ceasefire around the Russian-occupied town took effect early on Tuesday, October 27, to allow aid deliveries and civilian evacuations, and Ukraine’s ombudsman said both sides were observing it. Russia’s Defence Ministry said its forces stopped firing on the Kherson front at 4 a.m. Moscow time, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said no violations had been reported.
Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia said the pause will run until 22:59 Kyiv time on Sunday, November 1, calling it the “largest de-escalation since 2022.” Russia has not published its own end date.
The two teams are led by the countries’ human rights commissioners: Dmytro Lubinets for Ukraine and Yana Lantratova for Russia. Lubinets said the two sides had recorded their agreements and signed a deal, and warned the operation would be difficult and carried out in stages. Lantratova said the priority was humanitarian aid for civilians in the area. Roads have to be cleared of mines first; doctors, food and medicine follow, then evacuations. According to the White House, residents who choose to leave will be taken to their preferred destination, whether in Russia or Ukraine.
The White House credits US First Lady Melania Trump, saying she used a channel to Moscow and Kyiv built through six earlier reunifications of 34 Ukrainian children.
She was not the only one pushing for it. Pope Leo XIV urged Vladimir Putin in a phone call on October 16 to accept a ceasefire around Oleshky so food and medicine could reach civilians, and the Vatican’s newspaper later ran the truce on its front page.
Oleshky sits on the left bank of the Dnipro, almost directly across the river from Ukrainian-held Kherson. Russian forces took it on the first day of the full-scale invasion in 2022, and around 90 percent of it was flooded when the Kakhovka dam was destroyed in 2023. Before the war, about 24,000 people lived there.
How many remain depends on who is counting. The White House says 1,700 to 2,000, mostly elderly, with about 50 children. Russian authorities put it at 1,500 to 2,000, including around 15 children. No formal count has been made since 2022.
The two sides tell opposite stories about how the town got here. Kyiv says Russian forces have kept residents from leaving and accuses them of using the remaining population as human shields. Moscow says it is Ukraine that has besieged the town: Vladimir Saldo, Kherson’s Russian-installed governor, accuses Ukrainian forces of remotely mining the access roads and hitting vehicles carrying food, fuel and medicine. Lantratova has also said most residents who wanted to leave had already done so voluntarily.
IBN cannot independently verify either account. Independent observers have had almost no access, and much of what is known about conditions inside comes from people who have left or from relatives’ messages.
The pause covers the Oleshky area only. Elsewhere, the night looked like any other.
Russia fired 16 ballistic missiles at Kyiv, two of which Ukraine says it shot down. They hit a university campus and other parts of the city, killing at least one person and injuring 15, according to Ukrainian officials. Russia’s Defence Ministry said it targeted defence industry and transport infrastructure.
In the other direction, Russia’s Defence Ministry said it downed 222 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions, Crimea and the Black Sea. In occupied Zaporizhzhia region, a drone hit a bus near Primorsk, killing one person and injuring 30, according to Russian-installed governor Yevgeny Balitsky.
Still, the truce is unusual. Kyiv and Moscow have declared holiday truces before, but those were unilateral, were not about a humanitarian crisis and had no open US mediation. Peskov said the arrangement could become a template for similar deals elsewhere, and Zelensky has said three-way talks with the US and Russia should resume in Abu Dhabi in early November.
For now, the measure of success is simpler than any peace deal: whether the aid gets in, and whether the people who want to leave get out before Sunday night.