The chef behind World Central Kitchen met the first lady’s Ukraine ceasefire celebration with a video of bodies strewn across a railway platform.
José Andrés, the Spanish-born chef who founded the nonprofit World Central Kitchen, tagged First Lady Melania Trump in that post while the localized truce she brokered in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Oleshky was still in force. The ceasefire took effect at 3 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026, and is due to last through Sunday, Nov. 1.
“One small gesture of ‘compassion’ doesn’t cover up the real tragedy that civilians are facing every day!” he wrote.
Andrés, 57, who owns multiple restaurants across the U.S., also wrote that the more than 2,000 people made safer on paper had been taken initially across the river to Kherson, into Russian rather than Ukrainian territory, and that the killing of civilians continues across the country.
Melania Trump, 56, welcomed the prospect of humanitarian aid reaching the city in a post on X on Thursday, Oct. 29, writing, “May this humanitarian mission end the suffering and begin a new chapter of durable peace between Russia and Ukraine.” That same day, a Russian drone strike on a crowded rail platform in Dnipro killed at least 14 people.
Two Teenage Girls in Chernihiv
In the northern city of Chernihiv, a Russian drone hit a crowded downtown street, killing two teenage girls and wounding 23 people. In Kremenchuk, strikes on residential buildings killed three people and wounded 32, according to regional authorities. Three separate Russian attacks hit city buses in Zaporizhzhia.
The first lady spent the day hailing the Oleshky ceasefire as “historic” and said nothing about the strikes elsewhere in Ukraine. Her team called the truce “the first sign towards real, everlasting peace within this war-torn region.”
Doctors First, Then Evacuation Corridors
On Wednesday, Oct. 28, the human rights ombudspersons on both sides — Russia’s Yana Lantratova and Ukraine’s Dmytro Lubinets — said that there had been no violations in Oleshky for 30 hours. A truce that holds would be the first meaningful pause the two sides have kept since Russia invaded more than 4½ years ago; earlier attempts never took hold or soon fell apart.
About 2,000 residents are stranded in Oleshky with dwindling food and medicine, unable to leave because of explosive mines and drone attacks, according to the U.N. Negotiators involved in the mission said doctors, medicines, food supplies and water would be sent in before any evacuation corridors open. Russia’s occupying forces impose strict limits on who can enter the city, and as of Wednesday, Oct. 28, there was no word on how the operation was unfolding.
Oleshky sits in the partially occupied Kherson region, about 550 kilometers (340 miles) southeast of Kyiv, where the Dnipro River separates Russian and Ukrainian forces. Moscow’s troops captured it on the first day of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Floodwaters inundated the town in June 2023 after a dam collapse.
Accusations She Upstaged Pope Leo
The White House said Melania Trump brokered the humanitarian mission, and her office said she led talks with civilian negotiators from Russia and Ukraine after U.N. officials briefed her on the situation in the town. The announcement drew accusations that she was trying to take credit from Pope Leo XIV, who spoke in October with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin, urging them to allow aid into Oleshky and the safe evacuation of civilians, the Vatican said.
Zelenskyy thanked her for the mission. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov praised her role. Minutes after the 3 a.m. start of the truce, multiple ballistic missile explosions shook Kyiv and air alerts sounded in several parts of the country. Late Monday, Oct. 26, Russian ballistic missiles damaged the grounds of a university in the capital, killing one person and leaving 10 injured, city officials said, and in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, attacks killed two people and injured four.
The aid operation was arranged ahead of a new round of U.S.-brokered talks between Russia and Ukraine expected in November, aimed at ending a war now in its fifth year.
In a separate post, Andrés addressed President Donald Trump and his special envoys, tagging Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Until a real ceasefire or an end to the war can be achieved, he wrote, they should get Putin to “stop hunting for children, women, elderly.”