Add StudioX as a preferred source on GoogleA rare humanitarian ceasefire in Ukraine’s Kherson region, which allowed civilians to leave the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, has ended, BBC World reports.
The localised truce was due to expire at 22:59 Ukrainian time (21:00 GMT) on Sunday. It held after being put in place last week, although fighting continued in other parts of the country.
Evacuation from a trapped city
The pause began on Tuesday and was brokered with the help of US First Lady Melania Trump and Pope Leo. It was first limited to Oleshky and later widened to cover the whole Kherson region.
Russia has held Oleshky since the first days of its full-scale invasion in February 2022. The city is hemmed in by the Dnipro river on one side and Russian forces on the other. Routes out were mined and exposed to drone attacks, BBC World says.
Residents were suffering severe shortages of food, water and electricity, and many reportedly resorted to cooking garden weeds to survive. On Saturday there were emotional reunions between relatives who had not seen each other for years.
Ukrainian military positions are only 5 km (3.1 miles) from Oleshky, but evacuees could not cross directly. They travelled through Russian-occupied territory to southern Russia, flew to Belarus and were then driven across Ukraine’s northern border.
Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, said the oldest evacuee was 94 and the youngest was one year old.
Strikes on power and a suspected hack
President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia hit energy infrastructure in four regions overnight on Saturday, leaving hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity. Some connections were restored on Sunday.
In the Dnipropetrovsk region, most customers had power back by early evening, but more than 60,000 were still without it, the governor said. Another overnight strike killed two people, including a 13-year-old girl, in the Vinnytsia region, according to the State Emergency Service.
Because of regular attacks on the grid, emergency power cuts have been introduced nationwide. In Kyiv, electricity is off for most of the day and water supplies are disrupted.
On Sunday evening, Ukraine’s air alert application was apparently hacked, the air force said. A message warned of radiation over Kyiv, which would suggest a possible nuclear attack. The air force said the app had probably been subjected to hostile interference and stressed that there was no radiation threat.
Zelensky also said Ukraine struck a major missile fuel producer in Russia’s Rostov region, causing a fire and damaging four production facilities.
Call for more air defence
Zelensky said the intensity of Russian strikes over the past week had been “extremely high”. He claimed Russia was trying to exploit a shortage of ballistic missile interceptors.
He said Ukraine tells the United States, Europe and other partners “every day” that it needs Patriot missiles, described as the only effective weapon against Russia’s ballistic missiles. He thanked countries for their support and longer-term commitments but again asked for more immediate help.
Source: BBC World
Harnaik Singh Rathor is the Founder, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief of StudioX News Canada, Canada's multilingual digital news network serving multilingual diaspora communities across Canada. With a background in media production, public relations, and multicultural communications, he founded StudioX Film and TV Corporation to bridge the gap between mainstream Canadian media and the country's diverse immigrant communities. He is a member of the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), RTDNA Canada, CPRS Vancouver, NEPMCC, and the Canadian Freelance Union (Unifor). Based in Surrey, British Columbia. | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harnaiksinghrathor/ | Muck Rack: https://muckrack.com/harnaiksinghrathor | Email: editor@studioxnews.ca
