(AFP) – Residents of the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, ravaged by years of war, arrived in Ukraine on Saturday after being evacuated via Belarus during a rare truce brokered by US First Lady Melania Trump. An AFP journalist saw the residents, some draped in Ukrainian flags, disembark buses and tearfully embrace their loved ones in emotional scenes. The city of Oleshky in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, occupied by the Russian military since 2022, had been caught in intense fighting between the two sides, leaving residents unable to escape and starving.
Announcing the ceasefire last week, First Lady Melania Trump described the city as being “on the brink of disaster” and said that without her intervention, bringing aid to its beleaguered residents would have been “impossible.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on X: “As of now, Ukrainian citizens from Oleshky have crossed the Ukrainian border.” “All of them will receive the assistance they need,” he added.
Ukrainian and Russian officials visited the city together on Friday, delivering aid and marshalling those who wanted to leave in a rare show of cooperation between the warring sides. The truce, which began early Tuesday, has marked the longest pause in fighting between Russia and Ukraine anywhere on the front line since Russia invaded its neighbor in February 2022, and comes more than four-and-a-half years into a conflict that has left hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians dead. It is scheduled to end on Sunday evening.
In northern Ukraine, friends and relatives of those being evacuated anxiously awaited their return. Daryna Goncharova, 40, said earlier she was waiting to see her parents who were trapped in the town. When asked what she would tell them when they arrived, she said: “That I love them.” Yelyzaveta Paliy, who was waiting for her father to return, said she never expected him to be gone so long. “We last saw him at the end of January 2024, when my sister, mum, and I left, and he stayed behind,” the 19-year-old said. “Sadly, two years have already passed, and so far, it’s just been an evacuation,” she expressed, hoping the city could return to Ukrainian control.
Captured by Russia in 2022, locals in the city had faced food, water, and medicine shortages for months, while some were forced to hunt and eat pigeons, former residents told AFP. Around 2,000 residents — compared with 24,000 before the Russian invasion — were still in Oleshky ahead of the humanitarian operation, according to Kyiv’s estimates. Neither Moscow nor Kyiv has specified the number of people evacuated, and authorities in both countries previously indicated that many residents wished to remain in the city, even in the event of renewed fighting.
Russia, which denies targeting civilians, now occupies around a fifth of its neighbor: the Crimean peninsula, which it annexed in 2014, most of the eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk — collectively referred to as the Donbas — and large parts of the southern Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. US-mediated talks between Russia and Ukraine are set to resume in November, having been effectively frozen since the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran in February.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, Russia fired more than 100 drones overnight, according to the Ukrainian air force. The capital Kyiv was suffering electricity shortages again on Saturday, following Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure the day before, private Ukrainian energy provider DTEK said.
– Mykola ZAVGORODNIY
© 2024 AFP
