The doors of 25 buses stood open in Oleshky on Friday morning, and anyone who wanted out of the ruined town had until 2 p.m. local time to climb aboard. Moscow and Kyiv ran the operation together, something that had not happened once in a war now well into its fifth year.
It rests on a narrowly drawn ceasefire. The White House announced the pause on October 23, fighting around the town stopped early on Tuesday, and the truce is meant to lapse late on Sunday evening Kyiv time. First Lady Melania Trump is credited as the broker; her office says she heard about the situation at a UN General Assembly event in September. NBC reported that Pope Leo XIV also played a part.
On the ground, two ombudspersons who normally trade accusations worked side by side: Ukraine’s Dmytro Lubinets and Russia’s Yana Lantratova. Sappers had cleared the access roads first. The convoy could carry 750 passengers and was backed by nine ambulances and more than 50 Russian medics. Kyiv counted 527 people on its list of those wanting to reach areas it controls.
Their journey home is strikingly indirect. Ukrainian lines sit only about five kilometres away, yet the evacuees head south through Armyansk in Crimea to Anapa in Russia, then fly on a Russian military aircraft to Gomel in Belarus before crossing by road into Ukraine’s Chernihiv region. A second column took people who chose to settle in Russia.
Several hundred residents decided to stay put, even without gas, power or running water. They were handed food, hygiene kits and generator fuel. By evening Lantratova said everything had passed “without any incidents,” and she and Lubinets jointly asked the first lady to make such missions a regular event.
