Before the war, Oleshky had about 24,000 people. Russian troops took the town, in Ukraine’s Kherson region, in the first days of the February 2022 invasion, and they have held it ever since. In 2023 the Kakhovka Dam was destroyed and the water came in; the White House puts the flooded share of the town at around 90 percent. American estimates now count between 1,700 and 2,000 people still living there, most of them elderly, along with about 50 children. Residents and officials have reported serious shortages of food and medicine. On October 6, people rallied in Kyiv to demand a humanitarian corridor to get the civilians out.
For years almost nobody outside the region said the town’s name. Now two of the most powerful addresses in the Western world are arguing over who saved it.
As Al Jazeera’s Edna Mohamed reports, a local truce expected to help more than 1,000 civilians has started a contest over authorship. The White House credits First Lady Melania Trump. The Vatican points to Pope Leo.
The announcement
The first lady announced the ceasefire on Friday, October 23. She called the situation “dire” and said the town stood on the “brink of disaster”. Its residents, she said, “have limited electricity, live amid mined roads, and endure regular military attacks.” She also said: “without my intervention, the possibility to bring humanitarian aid into the city and to evacuate the elderly would be impossible.”
Her office’s statement gives her a title, capital letters included: she shaped the agreement’s goals, procedures and timing “in her formal role as Exclusive Intermediary.” It says she and her representative dealt “directly with Russian and Ukrainian leadership,” using a channel built “through the previous six reunifications of 34 children.” The plan sends non-military, civilian leaders from both countries to visit residents in their homes and assess their needs. Anyone who wants to leave will be taken to a destination of their choosing. “I anticipate some will want to go to Russia, and some to Ukraine,” she said. An “impartial American media organization,” not named in the statement, would go along and document the work. According to CNN, Newsmax later said it had been given exclusive television access.
The statement traces the initiative to a private conversation at her Fostering the Future Together event during the 81st UN General Assembly. It does not mention the pope or the Vatican anywhere.
The other telephone
The next morning L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s newspaper, ran a front-page article under the headline “Humanitarian truce for Oleshky.” In the Vatican’s account, the truce followed calls in which Pope Leo urged both leaders to pause the fighting and save the civilians trapped in the town.
The dates support that account. In late September Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the pope’s special envoy, raised conditions in Oleshky with Russian authorities in Moscow. On October 16 Leo telephoned Vladimir Putin from hospital, where he was recovering from surgery to remove a cancerous lung tumour, and expressed “deep concern about the grave humanitarian situation in the city of Oleshky.” He asked for a ceasefire so that food and medical aid could get in. On October 19 he spoke with Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the town. Vatican News noted that the truce was announced a week after the pope’s appeal.
Neither account cancels the other. A sick man asked for the truce from a hospital bed. A woman in the White House says she negotiated its terms. Kyiv thanked one of them by name.
Tuesday, 3am
The guns were not meant to fall silent until October 29. CNN reported that the ceasefire took effect two days early, at 3am Kyiv time on Tuesday. The first lady said the zone had grown “beyond Oleshky, within the Kherson Region, to provide safe passage for the humanitarian convoys.” Al Jazeera reported that Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Telegram it had stopped shelling toward Kherson city from 4am Moscow time, the same hour. Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s parliamentary human rights commissioner and head of its negotiating team, wrote that “the Ukrainian side is honouring its commitments.” He has publicly thanked the first lady and her team. Writing on X, he described a humanitarian mission run “with the mediation and coordination of US First Lady Melania Trump, in cooperation with Yana Lantratova, Russia’s Commissioner for Human Rights.”
Al Jazeera says the truce is scheduled to end on Sunday; CNN reported that it was unclear how long it would last. On Monday the Kremlin said the arrangement could serve as a model for future local ceasefires. Both sides have said it does not end the wider war, and every earlier attempt to stop that war has failed. While Oleshky waited for its convoys, CNN reported, a 46-year-old woman was killed and more than a dozen people were injured in an attack on Kyiv.
The arithmetic of credit
A reflection, not a finding: in wartime the powerful are quicker to own a truce than the ruined towns that make one necessary, and the people of Oleshky will be counted by those who now claim them.
The quarrel has a history. Leo, the first American pope, has said that President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the Iran war violated Catholic “just war” principles. In April Trump called him “weak on crime, weak on nuclear weapons,” and claimed without evidence that Leo became pope only because Trump was president. On Truth Social he told the pope to “get his act together as Pope” and stop “catering to the Radical Left,” which he said was “hurting the Catholic Church!”
The US midterm elections are next week. Up to 20 percent of American adults identify as Catholic. A Pew Research Center survey conducted from September 28 to October 4 found Trump’s approval among Catholics had fallen from 47 percent in January 2025 to 30 percent. Among white Catholics it fell from 59 to 39 percent, and among Hispanic Catholics from 31 to 18. Leaving the pope out of the story is unlikely to win those votes back.
In Oleshky, the civilian teams are supposed to knock on doors and ask each resident one question: stay, or go, and if go, to which country. Most of the people answering are old. Some of them have lived through the war, the occupation and the flood. Their answers have to come before Sunday, if Sunday really is the end.