A still image taken from an undated drone video released Sept. 12 shows a destroyed buildings in Oleshky, Kherson region. (34th Separate Marine Brigade/Reuters)
Melania Trump has secured a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine in the Russian-controlled city of Oleshky, which will begin on Oct. 29, the White House said on Friday.
Residents of the southern Ukrainian town, occupied by Russian forces since February 2022, have reported a deepening food crisis.
"Both nations agreed to temporarily stop all military action in Oleshky to allow for humanitarian aid to enter and to prepare a civilian evacuation through a designated safe passageway," a White House statement said.
The statement said Melania Trump and her representative worked directly with Russian and Ukrainian leadership to define the terms of the localized ceasefire.
"The situation in Oleshky is dire. Oleshky is a front-line war city on the brink of disaster. Oleshky's remaining population is comprised primarily of elderly residents who urgently need medical attention, medicine, food and clean water," Melania Trump said in the statement.
The ceasefire will allow non-military teams from both countries to visit residents in their homes and co-ordinate transportation for those wishing to evacuate to either Russia or Ukraine.
A still image taken from an undated drone video released Sept. 12 shows a destroyed buildings in Oleshky, Kherson region. (34th Separate Marine Brigade/Reuters)
Ukraine's top negotiator, David Arakhamia, said on Telegram that the humanitarian operation would start once a ceasefire was in place.
Arakhamia said the accord, the result of a long process involving Melania Trump and also Pope Leo, would set up a humanitarian corridor for residents to leave and allow assistance into the town.
The Kremlin said an evacuation in Oleshky would take at least a few days. It praised Melania Trump and said work was underway to ease the humanitarian situation in Oleshky after Russian President Vladimir Putin told Pope Leo he was ready to co-operate on the issue. Leo and Putin reportedly spoke by telephone last week.
Russian forces will halt fire from 4 a.m. local time on Oct. 27 to facilitate the humanitarian operation, Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov said on Friday.
Since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House early last year, Melania Trump has been been active in trying to get Ukrainian children seized by Russia during the war returned to their families.
Oleshky, located across the Dnipro River from Kherson, has a remaining population of 1,700 to 2,000 people — primarily elderly residents, along with about 50 children — down from roughly 24,000 before the war, the White House said. About 90 per cent of the city was flooded following the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, according to the White House.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday that peace negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and the United States had agreed to meet at a technical level in the first half of November in Abu Dhabi.
Zelenskyy, in comments to the Hudson Institute think-tank, said he spoke with U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff on Friday after their meeting with Putin earlier this week. Zelenskyy said any peace agreement would need strong security guarantees for Ukraine and funding for 10 years to maintain the Ukrainian army.
Previous rounds of talks with mediation from Turkey did not change the landscape of the war, though exchanges of war prisoners followed.
The developments Friday come after a two-week period in which the White House's interventions into the nearly five-year war have received bracing criticism from Ukraine's European allies, Democrats and even some Republicans.
First, President Trump struck a deal with Putin to import diesel. The Trump administration has pressured Kyiv to halt its attacks on Russian energy infrastructure — which it blames for driving up the price of diesel.
Trump announced soon after, unilaterally, that the two sides had agreed to a ceasefire on energy attacks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was open to that possibility, but Russia had shown no inclination to halt its fire.
Zelenskyy on Oct. 14 then said Elon Musk's SpaceX had restricted its Starlink services. Throttling the speed of the satellite service, according to Ukraine officials, hampers its ability to conduct strikes on Russian targets and to defend itself from Russian drones using its own interceptor drones.
Trump and Musk, along with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have since offered shifting explanations on precisely what occurred and who ordered the Starlink services throttled.
"Whether I called or whether somebody else called, doesn't make any difference, I guess," Trump told reporters on Thursday. "The bottom line — [Musk] put it back."
The relationship between Trump and Zelenskyy has often been tense since 2019, when the U.S. president was impeached, though ultimately acquitted in the Senate, of pressuring the Ukraine president for political favours in exchange for military aid to Kyiv. Last year, Trump and Vice-President JD Vance berated Zelenskyy in the White House for what they perceived as a lack of gratitude for U.S. support of Ukraine.
In fighting on Friday, Moscow's largest airport, Sheremetyevo, resumed operations after it was forced to briefly suspend its work and ask passengers to move to safe locations due to a Ukrainian drone threat.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in a statement on Telegram that air defence forces had shot down 21 Ukrainian drones that were headed to the Russian capital over a 2-hour period.
Rosaviatsiya, Russia's aviation watchdog, said earlier on Friday that three of Moscow's airports had temporarily suspended flight operations, something they do when there is Ukrainian drone activity.
The warring sides engaged in another exchange of war prisoners, Ukraine officials confirmed on Friday, involving 270 people on each side being repatriated. Earlier in the week, the two sides exchanged the bodies of several people killed in the war, in Belarus.
More than 19,000 Ukrainian civilians, including 762 children, have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale war, Ukraine's acting prosecutor general said on Friday.
In 2026 alone, Ukrainian prosecutors confirmed the deaths of 2,960 civilians, including 668 children, Anton Kovalskyi said on Telegram.