Ukraine just got hundreds of people out of Russian-occupied Oleshky
1 hour ago · 31 October 2026Share
A maternity hospital in Kherson after Russian shelling on January 11, 2023, with fire damage to the personnel room. File photo. State Emergency Service of Ukraine · CC BY 4.0
Hundreds of people just got out of Oleshky.
That's the Ukrainian town Russia has held since the early weeks of the war, back in 2022.
And a few hours ago, they crossed back into Ukraine.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed it himself, on X. He said Ukrainian citizens from Oleshky had crossed the border in the Chernihiv region. He said all of them will get the help they need. And he thanked the United States and Melania Trump, America's First Lady, for making it happen.
So how did they actually get home?
Not the short way. Evacuees left Oleshky by bus and drove through Russian-occupied Crimea to Anapa, a city in Russia itself. From there, four planes flew them to Gomel, in Belarus. Then buses took them across the border into Ukraine.
David Arakhamia is the Ukrainian MP who leads President Zelenskyy's parliamentary faction. He said the fourth and final plane landed in Gomel earlier today. He said all the evacuated Ukrainian citizens, together with the Ukrainian delegation, would be on Ukrainian territory within a few hours.
Now here's where this all comes from.
The White House says this whole evacuation only happened because Melania Trump brokered a localised ceasefire around Oleshky. It started four days ago, at 3am local time, and was meant to run until this coming evening. People are calling it the longest pause in fighting anywhere on the front line since Russia invaded in 2022. This war is nearly five years old now.
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Contains modified Landsat 8 satellite imagery of the Dnipro River estuary captured in August 2015. File photo. Anastasiya · CC BY-SA 4.0
Two days before the crossing, Melania Trump posted that the convoy could safely evacuate more than 750 people. But here's the thing. Neither Kyiv nor Moscow has actually confirmed how many people got out.
And this wasn't just paperwork. A demining operation to clear the roads into Oleshky started the moment the ceasefire began, four days ago. Russia and Ukraine both said it was finished two days later. Then Ukrainian and Russian officials went into the town together. They delivered aid. They helped organise who wanted to leave. Two warring sides, working side by side.
Dmytro Lubinets is Ukraine's Human Rights Ombudsman. He went into Oleshky himself to escort people out. That makes him the first senior Ukrainian official to openly go into Russian-occupied territory since the war began.
On the other side, Yana Lantratova, Russia's human rights commissioner, ran the operation with him. She says the buses leaving Oleshky weren't all headed to Ukraine. Some residents chose to go to Russia instead.
Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, had also pushed both Russia and Ukraine this month to allow aid in and let people out.
But the ceasefire only covered Oleshky. Nowhere else.
Overnight, Russian drones hit energy and railway targets in Ukraine. Zelenskyy says 280,000 households in the Dnipro and Kyiv regions lost power. Russia's defence ministry says it shot down 433 Ukrainian drones overnight. And in Russia's Bryansk region, the regional governor says a Ukrainian drone attack killed two people and wounded five.
So while hundreds of people were walking free from one town, the rest of the war carried on exactly as before.
Here's what we still don't know. Nobody has said how many of Oleshky's remaining residents chose Ukraine, how many chose Russia, or how many just stayed. And nobody knows what happens when the ceasefire's original deadline hits, this evening. Whether it gets extended, or whether the fighting starts up again around the town.
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