The longest multi-day truce between Russia and Ukraine, limited to Ukraine’s eastern Kherson region, has come to an end with no violations reported by either side, but also no sign of an extension.
The truce, which ended on Sunday night, allowed hundreds of besieged residents of the Russian-occupied Ukrainian town of Oleshky to be evacuated in a rare joint operation between Kyiv and Moscow.
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Russian strikes elsewhere in Ukraine on Sunday left hundreds of thousands of households without power, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. In Russia, meanwhile, authorities reported major damage to an industrial site following Ukrainian drone attacks on the Nizhny Novgorod region.
The six-day localised ceasefire in the front-line Oleshky and the surrounding area was reached after mediation efforts by United States First Lady Melania Trump and with the involvement of Pope Leo XIV. It was set to expire at 10:59pm Ukraine time (20:59 GMT).
On Sunday, Ukraine’s military said it evacuated 167 more people from threatened areas of the southern Kherson region, including 22 children and 21 people with limited mobility requiring special assistance.
“Units of civil-military cooperation of the ‘South’ group of forces, in cooperation with representatives of local authorities, evacuated 167 civilians to safer points in the Kherson region,” Ukraine’s General Staff wrote on Telegram.
An estimated 2,000 civilians were in Oleshky when the temporary truce took hold. They were offered the choice to evacuate to Kyiv-controlled territory of Ukraine or territory occupied by Russia, or to remain in the city with replenished food and medical supplies.
“The ceasefire across Oleshky and the surrounding Kherson region has provided residents with the freedom to move, access to food, clean water, medicine, plus a renewed sense of dignity without the constant threat of attack,” Melania Trump said on social media. “Let Oleshky become the starting point for lasting peace.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, quoted by Russian news agencies, said Moscow had a positive view of how the operation was conducted in Oleshky, as well as of the coordination between the two countries’ human rights commissioners.
A Ukrainian official, however, told the AFP news agency that Russia reportedly refused an offer to extend the ceasefire after Kyiv’s Foreign Ministry proposed it.
Since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022, Moscow’s forces have occupied most of the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as the majority of territory in Ukraine’s southern Kherson and Zaporizhia regions.
Residents urged to remain vigilant
Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin urged residents to be vigilant as the expiry of the ceasefire neared on Sunday.
“I also strongly urge you not to visit the so-called ‘red zones’ – areas and settlements near the Dnipro [River],” Prokudin wrote on Telegram. “The intensity of Russian strikes there remains high, and the threat to life is extremely high.”
Residents in Kherson city, one of the remaining areas of the region still controlled by Ukraine, remained calm, despite knowing the quiet of the localised ceasefire would soon end.
“Don’t be afraid, keep holding on,” Oleksandr Knyha, head of the Mykola Kulish Kherson Regional Academic Music and Drama Theater, told the audience as he opened a concert.
Knyha is from Oleshky and used to commute from there to Kherson for work. He has not given up hope of returning home.
“That’s also what keeps me here,” he told the Associated Press news agency.
Fighting elsewhere
Elsewhere, Moscow and Kyiv have continued air strikes, with Zelenskyy saying on Sunday that Russia continues to target Ukraine’s energy systems before winter. Attacks on power infrastructure in four Ukrainian regions overnight cut electricity to hundreds of thousands of households, he said.
A Russian attack also killed three people, including a 13-year-old girl, in the Ukrainian region of Vinnytsia, when a drone hit the grounds of a vocational school, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said. Four others were wounded.
Russian drone attacks targeting Ukraine’s Kyiv region for a second consecutive day wounded a woman and damaged homes, energy infrastructure and a retail establishment, regional authorities said.
In its daily report on Sunday, Ukraine’s Air Force said that Moscow’s forces attacked Ukraine with 433 drones overnight, of which 371 were destroyed or suppressed.
Meanwhile, more than 100 Ukrainian drones were shot down over the skies of Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region east of Moscow, Governor Gleb Nikitin said on Sunday.
The attack sparked a blaze at the Kstovo oil refinery, Russian media outlets reported, sharing images of black plumes of smoke over the horizon.
Zelenskyy said Kyiv also struck a factory for missile components and air defence facilities in Russia’s southern Rostov region.
“We are justly defending ourselves against Russian aggression and doing everything to reduce Russia’s capability to continue it,” Zelenskyy said.