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. 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 ( ).
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. 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.
A Ukrainian official, however, told the 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. Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin urged residents to be vigilant as the expiry of the ceasefire neared on Sunday.
Knyha is from Oleshky and used to commute from there to Kherson for work. He has not given up hope of returning home. 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.
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