KYIV — The localized ceasefire in the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky has held for more than 30 hours, according to both Ukrainian and Russian human-rights officials, while Ukrainian forces continue operations elsewhere and Russia maintains missile and drone strikes on other cities.
Ukrainian parliamentary human-rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets and Russia’s ombudsperson Yana Lantratova both reported no violations in Oleshky as of Wednesday. The truce, arranged with the involvement of U.S. First Lady Melania Trump, is scheduled to run through Sunday. It is intended to allow humanitarian supplies to reach the roughly 2,000 remaining residents and to permit civilians who want to leave to do so. The town’s pre-war population was about 24,000. Ukrainian officials have previously said residents face severe shortages of food, water, and medicine; Russia has denied blocking departures.
While the pause holds in Oleshky, strikes continue elsewhere. Russian forces launched ballistic missiles and drones against Kyiv and other regions in the same period. Ukrainian authorities reported casualties and damage in the capital and in Kharkiv. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia has fired more than 100 ballistic missiles at Kyiv and the surrounding oblast in the past two weeks.
Zelenskyy also said Ukrainian forces have recaptured territory in recent operations and that the country’s battlefield position is the strongest it has been in some time. He referred to a previously undisclosed operation near Kupiansk in which Ukrainian troops used underground gas pipelines to outflank Russian positions, as well as an air-assault operation farther east and a separate effort farther north aimed at limiting Russian advances. No independent verification of the scale of the gains has been released.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre held a phone call with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and described the conversation as frank. Zelenskyy said the Nordic leaders pressed Putin to reduce attacks on energy and civilian infrastructure. The Kremlin’s public position after the call remained that any settlement must take Russia’s interests into account without conditions.
Day 1,708 of the full-scale invasion continues with a narrow, holding pause in one occupied town and active fighting and strikes everywhere else. The Oleshky window is open for the moment. The rest of the front is not.
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