Ukraine-Russia Local Truce Starts; Missiles Strike Kyiv

A localized pause in fighting began in southern Ukraine early Tuesday.

The ceasefire took hold at 3 a.m. to allow a humanitarian aid mission into Oleshky, a town under Russian occupation, later this week. U.S. first lady Melania Trump led talks with civilian negotiators from Russia and Ukraine after meeting U.N. officials briefed on conditions there, according to her office. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators, along with both countries' militaries, issued separate statements confirming the truce had started. The pause is scheduled to run through Saturday or longer.

Up to 2,000 people remain in Oleshky with food and medicine running low, and they cannot leave because of explosive mines and drone attacks in the area, the U.N. said. Negotiators on the aid mission said doctors, medicines, food supplies and water would be delivered before evacuation corridors open. The mission precedes a new round of U.S.-brokered talks between Russia and Ukraine expected next month, aimed at ending the war after more than 4½ years of fighting.

Missiles struck the capital minutes after the truce began. Multiple ballistic missile explosions shook Kyiv and air alerts sounded across several parts of the country. Attacks late Monday damaged the grounds of a university in Kyiv, killing one person and injuring 10, city officials said. In Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, authorities reported attacks late Monday that killed two people and injured four. "It is important that the world sees that Russia is showing nothing but a desire to kill and continue waging war," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote in an online post shortly afterward.

Oleshky lies in the partly occupied Kherson region, about 550 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, where the Dnipro River divides Russian and Ukrainian forces. Moscow's forces took the town on the first day of their full-scale invasion in 2022. Floodwaters from a dam collapse inundated the town in June 2023. Oleshky sits across the river from Kherson, the regional capital, which Russian forces seized early in the 2022 invasion and abandoned several months later.

The truce holds through Saturday at minimum, while the aid mission proceeds under a plan to bring supplies into Oleshky before any evacuation corridors open.