KHERSON, Ukraine (AP) — Civilians in southeastern Ukraine’s Kherson region prepared Sunday for the end of a localized ceasefire that marked the most important truce between Kyiv and Moscow from The full-scale invasion of Russia of Ukraine started almost five years ago.
The White House said that the first lady of the United States Melanie Trump helped negotiate the limited trucewhich began early Tuesday and is expected to end Sunday evening. The pause in hostilities allowed the besieged residents of the front-line town of Olechky to withdraw. evacuated in rare joint operation which ended on Saturday.
“The ceasefire in Oleshky and the surrounding Kherson region has given residents freedom of movement, access to food, clean water and medicine, and a renewed sense of dignity without the constant threat of attack,” Trump said on social media. “Let Oleshky become the starting point for lasting peace.”
An estimated 2,000 civilians were in Oleshky when the temporary truce came into effect. They were offered the choice of evacuating to territory controlled by Ukraine or Russia, or remaining in the city with restocked food and medical supplies. For the safety of those who remained, exact figures were not released after the evacuation.
On Saturday, at the Ukrainian border, family members waited to see their loved ones, while residents of neighboring villages lined the highway brandishing flags and flashlights to greet the humanitarian convoy.
But Moscow and kyiv continued their airstrikes elsewhere, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying on Sunday that Russia was continuing to target Ukraine’s energy systems ahead of winter.
Hundreds of thousands of families were left without power overnight as Moscow sought to exploit Ukraine’s lack of air defense, Zelenskyy said in a social media post.
“The intensity of the strikes is extremely high and the Russians are trying to make the most of the shortage of ballistic missile interceptors,” he said in an article on X.
Last day of ceasefire brings some respite
Residents of the Ukrainian city of Kherson remained calm on Sunday, despite knowing that the calm of the localized ceasefire would soon end.
“Don’t be afraid, keep holding on,” Oleksandr Knyha, director of the Mykola Kulish Kherson Regional Academic Music and Drama Theater, told the audience as he opened the concert.
The theater performs every Saturday and Sunday. This weekend’s shows took place during the ceasefire, but the company plans to perform next weekend as usual, even though local authorities warn that Russian forces have brought in more weapons and personnel and some residents expect increased bombing.
“Of course we want peace to finally come,” Knyha said. But “we have been working on the front lines for four years,” he added, referring to Kherson itself, and the theater has never canceled a performance.
“Whatever happens, the show is not canceled,” he said.
The company now performs in a basement and equips an additional bomb shelter. About 100 of the theater’s 120 employees work in Kherson and none have been evacuated.
Costume designer Alla Vasylenko, 58, said the silence of the brief truce still frightens her.
“Nothing will change,” she said. “Everything will go back to the way it was before the ceasefire, because to believe the Russians is to disbelieve yourself.”
Vasylenko has no plans to leave.
“I have 10 dogs, so I can’t leave,” she said. “They are pushing us to leave, but we need a place to go and the means to get there. »
The trip alone would cost between 30,000 and 50,000 hryvnias ($650 to $1,080), a significant sum for her, she said.
“Until we liberate the Left Bank, we have no certainty that this will end,” Vasylenko said, referring to the part of the region occupied by Russia.
For many in Kherson, a city that itself lived under Russian occupation, this belief is why they stay.
Knyha is from Oleshky, on the occupied Left Bank, and used to commute to work in Kherson. He has not lost hope of returning home.
“That’s also what keeps me here,” he said.
On the last day of the ceasefire, the theater staged a concert built around a “musical map of Ukraine,” with songs from the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed to Ukraine in 2014, to the Carpathian Mountains in southwest Ukraine.
“That’s also our job: to unite people and give them hope,” Knyha said.
Russian drone attack kills 3
Separately, a Russian attack killed three people, including a 13-year-old girl, in Ukraine’s Vinnytsia region when a drone hit the grounds of a vocational school, Ukraine’s emergency service said. Four other people were injured, including two 5-year-old girls and a 16-year-old boy.
Russian drone attacks also continued to target Ukraine’s kyiv region for the second day in a row, injuring a woman and damaging homes, energy infrastructure and a retail business, regional authorities said.
In its daily report on Sunday, the Ukrainian Air Force said Moscow’s forces attacked Ukraine with 433 drones overnight, of which 371 were destroyed or suppressed.
Elsewhere, more than 100 Ukrainian drones were shot down in the skies over Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region, east of Moscow, local governor Gleb Nikitin said on Sunday.
Nikitin said an industrial building in the town of Kstovo had suffered “significant damage”, but did not give further details. Russian media later reported that the attack sparked a fire at the Kstovo oil refinery, sharing images of plumes of black smoke on the horizon.
Local authorities later imposed limits on gasoline sales in the region after queues appeared at gas stations, Russian media reported, citing the Nizhny Novgorod regional government. Diesel sales were not affected, they said.
Zelensky said on Sunday that kyiv also struck a factory used to make missile components and air defense facilities in Russia’s southern Rostov region.
“We are rightly defending ourselves against Russian aggression and doing everything to reduce Russia’s ability to continue it,” Zelensky wrote.
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Katie Marie Davies contributed to this report from Manchester, England.
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Follow AP coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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