Ukraine is preparing a humanitarian shipment for Russian-occupied Oleshky on Oct. 30 while crews clear mines from access routes, amid conflicting official accounts of when a local ceasefire began.
Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights, said Thursday that teams were clearing routes and assembling cargo. He gave Oct. 30 as the target date but did not specify the shipment’s size, contents or arrival time.
Lubinets said the ceasefire had been in place for 54 hours and that no violations had been reported. Ukraine’s ombudsman’s office and Russia’s Defense Ministry each dated its start to Oct. 27. The ministry said Russian forces halted fire in the Kherson direction that day and would conduct engineering checks to support safe convoy movement.
Those later accounts differ from the White House’s Oct. 23 announcement, which scheduled the pause to begin Oct. 29. Neither the Ukrainian nor Russian statement explained the two-day gap. EconoTimes previously reported on the conflicting dates given for the Oleshky ceasefire.
The White House said the pause was intended to allow aid deliveries and prepare a designated passage for civilian evacuations. It estimated that 1,700 to 2,000 people remained in Oleshky, including about 50 children, and said no formal demographic count had been conducted there since 2022. Residents who wanted to leave were to receive transport to a destination of their choice in Russia or Ukraine.
Russia’s human-rights commissioner, Yana Lantratova, told the Associated Press that she had observed no violations during the pause. The AP said previous ceasefire efforts had produced no lasting pause and that arrangements for residents seeking to leave remained unsettled.
Lubinets said the ceasefire was due to continue through Nov. 1. The planned aid delivery on Oct. 30 is the next scheduled step.
