Published on •Updated
Evacuees from the city of Oleshky in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region arrived in Belarus on Saturday amid a humanitarian truce between Kyiv and Moscow.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Video footage shared on social media by Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, showed some of the evacuated residents stepping off a plane after landing in the country.
“We will be home soon! For now, we are on the territory of the Republic of Belarus — together with our people and even their beloved pets!” Lubinets wrote alongside the clip.
Ukrainian politician David Arakhamia had earlier announced that the fourth and final aircraft carrying evacuees had touched down in Gomel in southeastern Belarus.
“In just a few hours, all Ukrainian citizens evacuated from Oleshky, together with the Ukrainian delegation, will be back on Ukrainian soil,” he added in a post on Telegram.
Russia’s defence ministry also confirmed that people from Oleshky – which is under Russian occupation – who had requested to leave had been flown to Gomel. It shared video footage showing coaches arriving and people boarding a plane.
US First Lady Melania Trump, who helped broker the localised ceasefire, said on Friday that a convoy was ready to evacuate more than 750 people “who voluntarily choose to leave Oleshky.”
“It includes 25 buses, 50 medical professionals, and ambulances,” she said.
The ceasefire is due to last until Sunday evening.
Russian strikes on Ukraine
It comes as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said around 280,000 Ukrainian households had been left without power after Russian strikes overnight.
“Russian strikes have created a difficult situation with electricity supplies across our regions,” Zelenskyy wrote in a post on X.
He said around 200,000 households in Dnipro and the wider region were without electricity while a further 80,000 or more in the Kyiv region were also without power.
“Repair crews are working to deal with the aftermath of the strikes and doing everything they can to restore electricity supplies,” he said, adding that Russian forces had hit a “combined heat and power plant” in Kyiv on Friday night as well as four electrical substations in the eastern Dnipro region, among other targets.
