Oleshky truce: US announces pause in fighting for evacuation

The United States has announced a temporary truce in the city of Oleshky in the Kherson region. According to a White House statement, Russia and Ukraine have agreed to suspend all military activity in the city so that humanitarian aid can be delivered and the evacuation of civilians along a safe corridor can be prepared. The American side says the agreement was reached by U.S. First Lady Melania Trump.

Trump herself described the situation in Oleshky as “desperate”: the city lies right on the front line and is on the brink of catastrophe. The remaining residents are mostly elderly people who urgently need medical care, medicine, food and clean water. She said the townspeople have limited access to electricity, the surrounding roads are mined, and shelling is a regular occurrence. Without her “intervention,” she added, it would have been impossible to bring aid into the city and take the elderly out.

The city will be visited by civilian representatives of both countries with no ties to the military. They will call on residents and find out what help they need. Those who want to leave are promised coordinated support and transport to the place they wish to go. “I assume some will want to go to Russia and others to Ukraine,” Trump said.

Oleshky is in the Kherson region, on the opposite bank of the Dnipro from the city of Kherson, and is occupied by Russia.

According to the BBC, which cites local residents, people in the city are forced to eat weeds from their vegetable plots: the occupation authorities are not bringing in food or drinking water, and the vegetables grown over the summer have run out. One resident said that children who remain in the area suffer from malnutrition and a lack of medical care, and that without access to education their situation is getting worse.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on the social network X that Russia is deliberately creating a humanitarian catastrophe in the occupied part of the Kherson region: blocking access to food and medicine, obstructing aid and evacuation, while Russian FPV drones hunt people in the streets.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz