Civilians in Ukraine’s southeastern Kherson region prepared Sunday for the end of a localised ceasefire that has marked the most significant truce between Kyiv and Moscow since Russia’s full-scale military operation against Ukraine 4½ years ago.
The White House said US first lady Melania Trump helped to broker the limited truce, which began early Tuesday and is expected to end Sunday evening.
The pause in hostilities allowed besieged residents in the front-line city of Oleshky to be evacuated in a rare joint operation that ended Saturday.
An estimated 2,000 civilians were in Oleshky when the temporary truce took hold.
They were offered the choice of evacuating to territory controlled by Ukraine or Russia, or remaining in the city with replenished food and medical supplies.
For the safety of those who have stayed, exact numbers were not released after the evacuation.
At the Ukrainian border Saturday, family members waited for a glimpse of their loved ones, while residents of nearby villages lined the highway waving flags and flashlights to greet the humanitarian convoy.
But Moscow and Kyiv have continued aerial strikes elsewhere, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying Sunday that Russia continues to target Ukraine’s energy systems ahead of winter.
In a post on social media, Zelenskyy said that hundreds of thousands of families had been left without power overnight as Moscow sought to exploit Ukraine’s shortage of air defenses.
“The intensity of the strikes is extremely high, and the Russians are trying to take maximum advantage of the shortage of ballistic missile interceptors,” he said in a post on X.
