Russia rejects extending Olechky truce, the longest ceasefire since the 2022 invasion

A truce with a fixed end

Russia has refused a Ukrainian proposal to extend the ceasefire around Olechky, a town in the Russian-occupied south of Ukraine. A senior official in the Ukrainian presidency told AFP that the foreign ministry had offered an extension and that the Russians did not want one. The truce began on Tuesday, 27 October, in the morning, and is due to end on Sunday evening, 1 November, shortly before 23:00 local time. Its purpose was to let residents who wanted to leave be evacuated from the town, which lies on the front line in the Kherson region, has mined approaches and has suffered severe shortages for months.

The longest pause of the war

The truce is the longest ceasefire since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Neither Kyiv nor Moscow reported any violation of the agreement, unlike earlier partial truces, including one held over the Orthodox Easter. The pause also brought some relief to residents of Kherson city, on the other side of the Dnipro river, who live under crossfire from both armies. Few people AFP spoke to expected the calm to last. A local military source who asked not to be named predicted that the fighting would be "even worse than before". He said Russian forces on the opposite bank had used the quiet days to bring in new troops, move ammunition stocks and gather intelligence on Ukrainian positions with surveillance drones.

Strikes continue on energy and border regions

The pause did not stop strikes elsewhere. Russia kept attacking Ukraine's energy infrastructure, which was already badly damaged as winter approaches. Volodymyr Zelensky said overnight Russian strikes on energy facilities in four regions had left "hundreds of thousands of families without electricity". Ukraine's energy ministry said the outages were hitting the Dnipropetrovsk and Kyiv regions in particular. Ukraine also continued striking Russia and the occupied territories. Russian authorities said an industrial enterprise about 400 km east of Moscow was damaged in a drone attack. Gleb Nikitine, governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, reported a massive drone attack overnight and on Sunday morning, adding:

“More than a hundred drones were destroyed.”

Ukraine said it had hit a major oil refinery in the same area. Russian-installed authorities in occupied Luhansk reported four dead from Ukrainian strikes on their area since Saturday evening.

Diplomacy ahead of APEC and the G20

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held a brief exchange on the sidelines of a G20 meeting in Atlanta. The two discussed whether their leaders could meet at the APEC summit in Shenzhen, China, on 18 and 19 November. The leaders in question are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The Atlanta meeting prepares the G20 summit in Miami in December, where tensions could rise because Trump has invited Putin. Trump has also said he would have "no problem" inviting Zelensky. The Olechky truce now ends without any agreed extension, while the diplomatic track between Washington and Moscow continues.