K.S. Griffith

An occupied Ukrainian town cooked GRASS to stay alive this summer, six miles from its own army. Saturday its people crossed back into Ukraine, and the one who got Moscow and Kyiv to hold their fire for it was Melania Trump. Oleshky sits on the Russian-held bank of the Dnipro, across the water from Kherson. Russian troops took it in the first days of the invasion. The Kakhovka dam was destroyed in 2023 and nine tenths of the town went under water. Twenty-four thousand people lived there once. About two thousand were left, most of them old, with no power since the dam and no food delivery since spring. The First Lady heard about them at the UN in September. She already had a line into both capitals from getting Ukrainian children back to their families, and she used it. On October 23 the White House named her the "exclusive intermediary." Her words: "without my intervention, the possibility to bring humanitarian aid into the city and to evacuate the elderly would be impossible." Tuesday at three in the morning the guns around Oleshky went quiet. Russia's Defense Ministry confirmed it had ceased fire in the Kherson direction. Ukraine's human rights commissioner went into the occupied city and posted from inside it. Twenty-five buses, nine ambulances and fifty medics went in on roads cleared of mines. Ukrainian lines were six miles away across the river. The road out ran nineteen hours through Crimea, Russia and Belarus. By her count, more than 750 people came out. The oldest was 94. The youngest was one. One of them, Tetiana Hurova: "When this whole crisis began, we thought nobody needed us." Zelensky thanked her by name. The ceasefire ran out at 10:59 Sunday night, Kyiv time, and the Ukrainian side says both parties honored their commitments. The envoys got the headlines. She got people home. 💎