Photo: Dmytro Petishkin, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons. File photo of Oleshky from 2016, not a photo of Saturday's evacuation.
Planes carrying civilians evacuated from the Russian-held Ukrainian town of Oleshky landed in Belarus on Saturday, the final transit leg of a rare humanitarian operation that brought enemies together to let starving residents leave a besieged frontline town.
Belarusian state news agency Belta reported that the planes landed at Gomel airport in southeastern Belarus, near the border with Ukraine. Ukrainian peace negotiator David Arakhamia, a close ally of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, later said the last, fourth plane had touched down in Gomel, and that within hours all the evacuated Ukrainian citizens, together with a Ukrainian delegation, would be on Ukrainian territory. Belta later reported that a convoy of buses carrying the residents had departed from Gomel airport.
The evacuees had taken a long, roundabout route home. They left Oleshky by bus on Friday, travelling through the Crimean peninsula to the Russian Black Sea town of Anapa, before flying to Belarus — because the front line runs just a few kilometres from Oleshky itself, making a direct crossing impossible. From Gomel, they were to continue to Ukraine via a border crossing.
A town cut off for years
Oleshky, on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River directly opposite the Ukrainian-held city of Kherson, has been under Russian occupation since the opening days of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Before the war it had a population of about 24,000; Ukrainian officials say around 1,700 people remained there, cut off from regular supplies of food and medicine as landmines and drone attacks disrupted deliveries.
Residents who left on Friday were described by Reuters as starving and exhausted. The evacuation was the first joint relief operation of its kind in four years and eight months of war, involving both Russian and Ukrainian authorities under a local ceasefire brokered by the United States. A convoy of 25 buses, with capacity for up to 750 people, was deployed, along with ambulances for people with limited mobility, and residents were given a four-hour window on Friday to leave.
Not everyone chose the same destination. While hundreds headed for Ukrainian-controlled territory via Belarus, dozens of others chose to travel deeper into Russian-controlled territory, according to DPA reporting of the operation. No final figure has yet been given for how many people were evacuated in total.
How the ceasefire came about
The local truce, which covers Oleshky and the wider Kherson region, was brokered with the help of US First Lady Melania Trump and took effect on Tuesday, October 27. It is due to last until Sunday evening, November 1 — Ukraine's human rights commissioner has put the expiry at 10:59 p.m. Kyiv time that day.
Ukraine's human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, and his Russian counterpart, Yana Lantratova, travelled to Oleshky on Friday to personally supervise the evacuation, and both thanked Melania Trump for brokering the ceasefire. They also raised the possibility of further humanitarian operations for people in need in other frontline towns if this one held.
The operation unfolded even as the wider war continued around it. On the same day the evacuees reached Belarus, Zelenskyy was in Istanbul for talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the war and Black Sea security, and Ukraine's air force reported another heavy night of Russian drone attacks. The Oleshky truce was always a local pause, not a wider suspension of hostilities.
What happens when the truce ends
The most immediate question is whether the remaining residents of Oleshky — more than 1,000 people may still be living in the town, according to DPA — get another chance to leave, or whether the window closes with the ceasefire on Sunday night. Arakhamia's statement that the evacuees would reach Ukrainian territory within hours suggests the first phase of the operation is close to complete, but neither side has yet announced a second evacuation round.
There is also a warning attached to the truce's end. German newspaper Bild reported on Thursday, citing Ukrainian servicemen, that Russian forces were using the ceasefire around Oleshky to regroup and secretly prepare an offensive on Kherson. That claim is attributed to Bild's sources alone and has not been confirmed by either military.
For the civilians who landed in Gomel on Saturday, though, the war's politics matter less than the journey's end. After years under occupation and months of shortages, they travelled by bus, plane and bus again across three countries' territory — all to cross a border a few kilometres from the town they left behind.
Sources: Reuters; Belta via Reuters; Channel News Asia; Straits Times; Kyiv Post; DPA.