After 1,711 Days Apart, Oleshky’s Evacuees Are Home in Ukraine
Dmytro had not seen his wife Larisa for 1,711 days. On Saturday afternoon, waiting near the border between Ukraine and Belarus, he watched the horizon for the bus carrying her home.
It came. Hundreds of people — and many of their pets — arrived back in Ukraine on Saturday afternoon, completing an evacuation from the Russian-occupied southern town of Oleshky that began on Friday under a local ceasefire brokered with help from United States First Lady Melania Trump and called for by Pope Leo XIV. President Volodymyr Zelensky announced their arrival on Telegram, thanking Trump for the mediation.
“And I thank everyone in the world — all journalists, all political and civic leaders, and all concerned people — who drew global attention to the situation in Oleshky and the genuine humanitarian catastrophe in the territory of Ukraine temporarily occupied by Russia. When the world pays attention, people are saved,” Zelensky said.
For Dmytro, a Ukrainian soldier, the reunion ends a separation imposed by occupation. When Russian forces took Oleshky, his wife’s connection to a Ukrainian serviceman made her vulnerable, and she feared being picked up at a Russian military checkpoint during “filtration” — the questioning that Ukrainians living under occupation have had to undergo before being allowed to leave for Ukrainian-controlled territory. So she stayed, hoping for a miracle. Instead, as CNN’s reporting from the border put it, her life became a nightmare.
Theirs was not the only family waiting at the border. Medical teams from the Chernihiv Regional Hospital were there too, led by director Andriy Zhydenko, who warned that the evacuees’ recovery will need care in itself. After months of starvation, he said, feeding people too much too quickly could be dangerous. “There are people with injuries, stroke survivors, and those with limited mobility,” he said. “All of my staff wanted to come here. People have suffered greatly there. There is no humanity.”
The journey home was anything but direct. Oleshky sits on the Dnipro River in the Kherson region, just kilometres from the front line, and its access routes are heavily mined and littered with drone and vehicle debris. Crossing the river straight into Ukrainian-controlled territory was not possible. Instead, after a two-day demining operation, those who wanted to leave gathered on Friday and travelled by bus through the Crimean peninsula — territory Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014 — to the Russian city of Anapa. From there they flew to Gomel in Belarus, four planes in all, before boarding buses for the final leg to the Ukrainian border.
Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, travelled to Oleshky to escort the evacuees personally — the first high-profile Ukrainian official to openly travel to occupied territory and Russia since the full-scale invasion began. His Russian counterpart, Yana Lantratova, supervised the operation alongside him.
Exactly how many people made the journey is still not confirmed. Ukrainian officials have said around 1,700 to 2,000 people remained in Oleshky from a pre-war population of about 24,000; roughly 40 percent of that population managed to flee early in the fighting, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based research group. An earlier figure of 527 returnees, given by a Ukrainian official, was later withdrawn, and officials have said a final count will follow once the operation is complete. The convoy itself had 25 buses with room for 750 people, and Melania Trump said on Friday that it could safely evacuate more than 750. Not everyone left: some residents chose to travel to Russian-controlled territory instead, and others stayed behind in Oleshky, where aid deliveries are now reaching them.
What they endured explains why this evacuation mattered so much. Oleshky has been under Russian occupation since the spring of 2022. The town was hit by a major flood in 2023 when the nearby Nova Kakhovka Dam collapsed — most likely, investigators believe, because of a Russian explosion — and several hundred people were reported to have died. In the years since, heavy fighting has wrecked much of what remained, and in recent months the humanitarian situation collapsed entirely: Ukrainian authorities reported the town had run out of food and other supplies in September, with no electricity, gas or medicine, and reports from the time said people were surviving on grass and weeds.
The ceasefire that made the evacuation possible began at 3 a.m. on Tuesday and is expected to run through Sunday evening. It is the first of its kind in this war, and the longest humanitarian pause of the conflict, now nearing its fifth year. The aid convoy that rolled toward the town earlier in the week carried food and medical supplies for those who stayed, as well as the buses for those who left.
Why this matters goes beyond one town. If a local truce can hold long enough to move hundreds of civilians out of a besieged frontline settlement — with both sides’ officials escorting the same buses — it becomes a template that could be attempted in other towns where civilians are trapped between armies. But the template has a clock on it. The truce expires on Sunday evening, and the same route that carried these families home runs through territory controlled by the very army they fled. Whether Oleshky becomes a precedent or a one-off will be decided by what happens when the guns are supposed to stay silent after Sunday — and by whether the world keeps paying attention, as Zelensky put it, once the buses have stopped arriving.
