Refugees from the besieged southern town of Oleshky have returned to free Ukrainian territory and reunited with family members.

Buses filled with the beneficiaries of a short-term ceasefire crossed back into Ukraine after a roundabout, U.S.-mediated journey took them through the nation’s occupied southern region to a Russian flight that landed in Belarus, and then finally back over the border.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy lauded the return of the Ukrainian citizens into the Chernihiv region of northern Ukraine in an X post and said he hoped humanitarian access to Oleskhy would remain open.

Ukrainian services and international agencies including the Red Cross and World Central Kitchen met the arrivals in a parking lot a few miles from the border, offering soup and coffee as well as medical care to hundreds who barely escaped a famine in the Ukrainian town just ahead of winter.

With a prewar population of some 24,000, Oleshky is perched across the Dnipro River from Kherson, which itself was occupied early in Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, only to be liberated by Ukrainian forces a few months later. Oleshky has remained under occupation and beset by constant airstrikes as well as a monthslong Russian food embargo.

Andrii Sybiha, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said in late September that the city’s remaining residents, believed to number a few thousand including an unspecified number of children, were “being forced to survive on grass and weeds, while medicines, clean water, electricity, and medical care are increasingly out of reach.”

“It’s thanks to our father’s green thumb that he was able to stay this long,” said Liza Paliy, 19, who, along with her sister and mother, spent the chilly autumn day waiting for her father to arrive. He’d refused to leave Oleshky with them when they fled in 2024.

The crisis in Oleshky has attracted the attention of everyone from the United Nations to Pope Leo to Melania Trump. The U.S. first lady pushed a humanitarian ceasefire to the top of President Donald Trump’s Ukraine agenda in the run-up to congressional midterm elections.

The U.S. leader’s attempts to broker a broader peace deal between Ukraine and Russia have fallen flat despite what Ukrainians have called a pressure campaign from Washington to accept terms that Kyiv considers unacceptable.

“Oleshky is just one part of a huge problem in occupied Ukraine,” said Alyona Lohvynenko, a communications manager for Karitas Ukraine.

As part of the ceasefire deal, residents of Oleshky were given the choice of resettlement in either Ukraine or Russia.

“Why should we leave our land? God gave it to us, we live here. And you all, where did you come from?” said Nila Tsymvaliuk, paraphrasing her response to the Russian offer having just set foot on unoccupied Ukrainian territory for the first time in four years. “We’re home. We’re home,” she said.

“We don’t want to go anywhere else,” said Nila’s husband, Volodymyr, from a wheelchair that she is pushing.

The evacuation was complicated by mines, which cover every exit from the village apart from a single footpath. Volodymyr Tsymvaliuk said he slipped and hit his head as they were leaving; he pulled off his thick fur hat to reveal a bandage around his head and a bruise welling over his right eye.

The 80-year-old nonetheless stood up from his chair and, leaning on his cane, said, “we’re tough. We’ll defeat our enemy.”

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