EXCLUSIVE: Moscow and Kyiv remain locked in a years-long grinding war, but in one Ukrainian city, the fight has quieted â and soon the Russian-occupied aging population in Oleshky will be offered humanitarian relief and a way out.
Behind the localized ceasefire is an unlikely mediator: first lady Melania Trump. And her diplomatic effort in the war-torn region is not over, Fox News Digital has learned.
Trump spent weeks moderating between Russian and Ukrainian officials to hammer out a deal over the devastated city in Ukraine’s Kherson region, ultimately winning the trust of both governments to serve as their “exclusive intermediary,” according to a senior adviser for the first lady.
The agreement brought officials from both countries together in Belarus last week to sign off on a detailed humanitarian operation aimed at getting food, clean water, medicine and doctors into Oleshky, Ukraine, and providing safe passage out for residents who want to leave.
Fox News Digital obtained the signature pages of the agreement, signed Oct. 23 by Russia’s human rights commissioner, Tatyana Moskalkova, and her Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Lubinets. The documents also lay out plans for continued humanitarian operations in the region coordinated with the first lady.
For the Slovenia-born first lady, the war in her native Europe was not entirely unfamiliar territory: she had already mediated exchanges of Ukrainian and Russian children. Negotiating an agreement to stop the fighting, however, marked a significant expansion of that role.
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Just across the Dnipro from the Ukrainian-held city of Kherson, Oleshky was once home to roughly 24,000 people. Russia seized the city at the outset of its 2022 invasion, and years of occupation and fighting have reduced its population to around 2,000, many of them elderly.
The city now sits squarely on the front line.
Russian forces use Oleshky as a base for attacks across the river into Kherson, while Ukrainian forces target Russian positions in and around the city. Roads have been mined, food and medicine have become scarce and basic services have largely collapsed.
“It’s hell there,” Yuri Sobolevsky, deputy chairman of the Kherson regional council, told The New York Times. “People need to be evacuated from there, 1,000%. They’re living 24/7 under risk of death.”
For Ukraine, the humanitarian mission presents a difficult tradeoff. The civilians trapped in Oleshky are Ukrainians in desperate need of food, medicine and a safe route out. But the city remains under Russian occupation and sits on an active front line, meaning halting attacks long enough to reach them also means temporarily easing military pressure on Russian forces operating in the area.
Getting Russia and Ukraine to stop firing at each other has proven extraordinarily difficult â not just for the first lady, but for her husband and his administration, which has spent much of President Donald Trump’s second term trying to bring the war to an end.
In Oleshky, however, both sides found a narrow point of agreement.
Oleshky first came onto Trump’s radar during United Nations General Assembly week in September, when the city’s worsening humanitarian crisis was raised at a Fostering the Future Together event that she hosted.
By then, the first lady had already worked with both governments to <a href="https://foxnews.com/politics/melania-trump-helps-reunite-fifth-group-ukraini
