Melania Trump holds no office. Her one channel to Moscow before this was a letter to Putin last year about children displaced by the war. The White House says she got Russia and Ukraine to stop shooting at one town, and Russia's ombudsman agrees. Everywhere else, Russia kept shooting.
The town is Oleshky, in occupied Kherson, where about 2,000 people are left. Russia's and Ukraine's human rights ombudsmen, Yana Lantratova and Dmytro Lubinets, said Wednesday the truce had gone 30 hours without a violation. It runs six days, through Sunday, for food, medicine and an evacuation. The same night, a Russian jet-powered drone set fire to an apartment building in Kharkiv and wounded five people, one of them 4 years old. The White House says the first lady brokered the deal after hearing about the town at a U.N. event last month, and the Kremlin thanked her. Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking at the Hudson Institute the day it was announced, did not mention Oleshky. He talked about the Patriot interceptors Washington still has on hold and the speed cap SpaceX put on Ukraine's military Starlink terminals on Oct. 14, the one Narativ reported Elon Musk left in place after Trump asked him to lift it.
Vladimir Putin took a call Tuesday from Norway's Jonas Gahr Støre and Finland's Alexander Stubb, the first such call from the leader of a Ukraine ally since Emmanuel Macron's in July 2025, and gave them nothing: peace when Russia's interests are "fully and unconditionally taken into account." Støre defended the call Wednesday. He is worried Europe's messages do not reach Putin when the Americans do the talking. Denmark's Mette Frederiksen said Europe should stick together rather than go solo. Zelensky says negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and the United States will meet in Abu Dhabi in the first half of November; the Kremlin says after Nov. 10. He calls them technical-level meetings. Neither government calls them peace talks.
