Oleshky: the truce secured by Melania Trump saves lives, but leaves Europe on the sidelines

A local truce began on the morning of Tuesday 27 October around Oleshky, a town in southern Ukraine that has been under occupation since February 2022. According to AFP, fighting was suspended at around 01:00 GMT and both capitals confirmed the halt in hostilities, although the agency was unable to verify this on the ground immediately. The duration and exact perimeter of the suspension remain unclear.

The initiative comes neither from the UN nor from a humanitarian organisation, but from Melania Trump, who describes herself in a White House statement of 23 October as "exclusive intermediary" and says she set the objectives, procedures and timetable of the agreement herself. That text announced a start on 29 October: it has apparently been brought forward.

A town emptied by war

Oleshky lies on the left bank of the Dnipro, opposite Kherson, less than ten kilometres away. The town had around 24,000 inhabitants before the war; some 2,000 are said to remain, according to AFP. The White House gives a range of 1,700 to 2,000 people, mostly elderly, including about fifty children.

It was flooded in 2023 after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, which Kyiv attributes to Russia. The access roads are mined, drones from both sides target vehicles, and former residents interviewed by AFP in early October described shortages of food and medicine.

The agreement provides for aid to enter, for demining, a secure passage, visits by civilian officials to residents' homes, and then transport to the destination of their choice, in Russia or in Ukraine. The Russian defence ministry announced a "technical reconnaissance" to secure this corridor. Dmitry Peskov confirmed that the Russian army was coordinating its timing, ABC News reports, and the Ukrainian general staff said it would carry out the orders.

The positions at stake

Washington points to a concrete result where official channels were no longer producing any. The argument is not a slight one: two thousand isolated people are worth more than a statement of principle.

Moscow accepts the framework. The Kremlin said on Monday that it was open to other humanitarian truces of this kind, while ruling out the general ceasefire demanded by Kyiv and the Europeans, and specifying that the November negotiations imply no slowdown in military operations. The sequence suits it twice over: it shows a cooperative Russia at no cost on the front.

Kyiv, for its part, distrusts the mechanism more than the principle. Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia on Sunday of organising the demining so that civilians "leave towards the Russian side and stay there". The night gives him arguments: salvoes of ballistic missiles struck Kyiv overnight from Monday to Tuesday, damaging university premises and metro infrastructure, according to Mayor Vitali Klitschko. On the occupied side, a coach travelling from Moscow to Crimea was hit by a Ukrainian drone, leaving one person dead and thirty-one injured, according to the Moscow-installed governor, Yevgeny Balitsky.

What this truce lacks

Two things are missing from this arrangement. The first is a neutral third party. The public documents consulted, the White House statement as well as agency dispatches, make no mention of any role for the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only institution mandated by the Geneva Conventions to verify that a population movement is voluntary. In its place, the statement announces that an unnamed "impartial American media organisation" will accompany the teams on the ground. A media outlet bears witness; it guarantees nothing. Yet humanitarian law prohibits forced transfers of population in occupied territory, and that is precisely what Kyiv fears.

The second absence is that of Europe. On 23 October, Dmitry Peskov announced to the TASS agency that Russian-Ukrainian talks under American mediation would take place in November in Abu Dhabi, with Europeans excluded at first. Faced with this, the European response has been scattered: Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre called Vladimir Putin to ask him to engage in genuine negotiations, an exchange Stubb described as "frank and substantive", while Denmark's Mette Frederiksen judged the initiative to be of little use and recalled the requirement of unity, Euronews reports. The two leaders made clear that they were not speaking on behalf of the Union.

This disorder is not a quarrel over protocol. A continent that funds, arms and will bear the consequences of this war cannot settle for learning from the press what is being decided on its eastern border.

What should be demanded

A truce that feeds two thousand people is good news, and it would be absurd to disdain it because it comes through an unexpected channel. But good news is not a method. Personal diplomacy produces gestures, not guarantees: it depends on a private will and leaves those it displaces without recourse.

Europe, and France in particular, would have two simple demands to make. That any evacuation operation in occupied territory take place in the presence of the ICRC, which records residents' choices out of sight of the armies. And that a single European delegation, mandated by the Council and the Commission, be present in Abu Dhabi from the first round, not as an observer but as a party.

There remains the question no one is asking: if a truce of a few days could be obtained for one town, what really prevents others from being obtained, if not the absence, among those waging this war, of a political will to end it?

Article written with the help of artificial intelligence.