Six-day truce around flooded Ukrainian town of Oleshky ends, Kherson braces for shelling to resume

A six-day pause in fighting around the Russian-occupied Ukrainian town of Oleshky expired Sunday night without being extended, Ukrainian officials said, ending what multiple news organizations described as the longest sustained multi-day ceasefire of the nearly four-and-a-half-year war. The localized truce, confined to a single front-line pocket of the Kherson region, had allowed humanitarian convoys to reach a town cut off from regular food deliveries for months and let residents who wished to leave travel to Ukrainian- or Russian-held territory.

The pause ran from 3 a.m. Kyiv time on October 27 to 10:59 p.m. Kyiv time (20:59 GMT) on November 1, according to Ukraine's General Staff and Russia's Defense Ministry, which separately confirmed observing it. Neither side signaled it would continue past the deadline. A Ukrainian official told Agence France-Presse that Kyiv's Foreign Ministry had proposed extending the arrangement and that Russia declined.

The numbers behind the truce

Oleshky had roughly 24,000 residents before Russia's 2022 invasion. The White House, in an October 23 statement from the Office of the First Lady, put the remaining population at an estimated 1,700 to 2,000 people, mostly elderly residents, along with about 50 children; no formal headcount has been possible since 2022. A European Union statement delivered at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe on October 1 cited a broader Ukrainian government estimate of up to 6,000 civilians, including more than 180 children, across several front-line communities in the occupied part of Kherson region that the operation was meant to eventually cover.

On the truce's final day, Ukraine's military said it had evacuated 167 more people from threatened areas of southern Kherson region, including 22 children and 21 people with limited mobility, Al Jazeera reported, citing Ukrainian armed forces figures. Earlier in the week, Ukrainian Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi told parliament that 527 people were preparing to leave Oleshky for Ukraine, a figure he retracted hours later, saying he had "made a mistake" and that "there are no set numbers yet." A volunteer working with residents, Ksenia Arkhipova, said separately that roughly 1,000 people had told her they wanted to leave, out of an estimated 2,000 still in the town.

A town already devastated

Russian forces have held Oleshky, on the Dnipro River's eastern bank opposite Ukrainian-held Kherson city, since the first days of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. In June 2023, the destruction of the Kakhovka dam flooded roughly 90 percent of the town's territory; Ukraine's National Resistance Center has estimated the flood killed more than 500 people in Oleshky alone, far above the 59 deaths Russia has acknowledged across its held territory.

A UN human rights monitoring mission documented no confirmed regular food deliveries to the town since the end of May, according to the EU's OSCE statement, which also cited testimony gathered by the OSCE's human rights office (ODIHR) describing long stretches without electricity, running water, heating or medical care, and accounts of Russian forces blocking residents from leaving. The United Kingdom's envoy to the OSCE, delivering a statement on the same day, said the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner had separately raised alarm over "the rapidly deteriorating crisis in Oleshky." Matthias Schmale, the UN's resident and humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, said before the truce that civilians were trapped "without a guaranteed safe exit route."

Civilians caught between two armies

The operation combined aid delivery with evacuation. A convoy of roughly 25 buses and ambulances, offering about 750 seats, assembled in Russian-occupied Crimea before entering Oleshky to deliver food and medicine and pick up residents choosing to leave. Routes into the town had to be demined first; two people were killed during that demining work, according to a wire report carried by The Week (India), citing the Associated Press.

Residents choosing Ukraine faced a circuitous journey: by bus to Anapa in southern Russia, then by air to Belarus, then overland across the border into northern Ukraine — a route of hundreds of kilometers to reach territory that, in a straight line, lies only a few kilometers across the river. Arkhipova, the volunteer, said Russian personnel were entering and in some cases moving into empty homes in the town during the truce, and were "pressuring local residents to evacuate to Russia, rather than to Ukraine." Russian and Ukrainian officials issued identically worded statements saying "everyone who wishes to leave Oleshky will have the opportunity to do so safely."

Reaction from Washington, Moscow and Kyiv

The White House said First Lady Melania Trump initiated and brokered the arrangement after learning of conditions in Oleshky at a United Nations event in New York; it said Pope Leo XIV separately urged both sides to permit aid and evacuations. In a statement reported by Al Jazeera as the truce expired, Melania Trump said it had given residents "freedom of movement, access to food, water and medicine, and dignity without constant attack," adding: "Let Oleshky become the starting point for lasting peace."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow viewed the operation positively, citing coordination between Ukraine's human-rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, and his Russian counterpart, Yana Lantratova. Lubinets reported no confirmed ceasefire violations over the operation's first 87 hours. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine's presidential office, said during the truce that "the humanitarian operation is underway in Oleshky."

Kherson city braces for the guns to resume

With no extension announced, authorities on the Ukrainian-held side of the river shifted from relief operations back to warnings. Kherson regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin urged residents to stay alert and avoid so-called "red zones" near the Dnipro, where he said Russian strikes remain intense and the threat to life is extremely high.

"Don't be afraid, keep holding on," Oleksandr Knyha, head of a Kherson regional theater who grew up in Oleshky and still hopes to return, told an audience in the city, according to Al Jazeera.

Fighting elsewhere in Ukraine continued throughout the truce and showed no sign of easing after it lapsed; Ukrainian officials reported large-scale Russian drone and missile activity targeting energy infrastructure in multiple regions during the same period, part of a broader pattern unrelated to the Kherson arrangement. No new ceasefire talks, local or national, had been announced as of Sunday night. Lubinets's office had signaled a further briefing on the operation's final tally was expected in the days ahead, but no comprehensive, agreed count of how many Oleshky residents ultimately left — or chose to remain — had been published by either government as the truce ended.