🇺🇦 🇷🇺 🇺🇲 Hours before the Oleshky truce, Moscow accuses Kyiv of 18 artillery strikes and 120-plus drone attacks on the town, while the Kremlin calls the Melania Trump-brokered deal a possible "precedent" A US-brokered local truce around Oleshky is due to start tonight, and both sides are already arguing about it. Russia's Defense Ministry said on Monday that Ukraine had struck the Russian-held town of Oleshky 18 times with artillery and carried out more than 120 drone attacks on it and the roads around it since Oct. 19, which it said had blocked food and medicine and stopped residents from leaving, Reuters reported. Reuters could not verify the claim. Ukraine did not respond immediately, and Kyiv has long accused Russia of keeping aid out and people in. The Kremlin, in the same breath, praised the deal. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the arrangement "could set a precedent" for humanitarian missions elsewhere, crediting "a direct, very positive, and coordinated involvement" of US negotiators and First Lady Melania Trump, according to TASS. "We would like to hope that the Ukrainian side will fulfill all the agreements," he added. He also said the planned three-way peace talks do not limit fighting anywhere else. The timing is tangled. The White House said on Friday that the truce, which Melania Trump said she "successfully secured," would allow aid deliveries and evacuations from Oct. 29. Russia's chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, then announced a "silence regime" on the Kherson front from 4 AM Moscow time on Oct. 27, Kyiv Post reported. Reuters puts the start at 3 AM Kyiv time Tuesday, which is 9 PM ET on Monday. Ukraine's General Staff said its forces will carry out President Volodymyr Zelensky's orders for the humanitarian mission. Pope Leo XIV had pressed both Putin and Zelensky on Oleshky in calls earlier this month. Oleshky sits on the Russian-held left bank of the Dnipro, about 5 km from Kherson city, and has been occupied since February 2022. Ukrainian officials say food has not reached it since May 26 and that about 6,000 people, including some 200 children, remain in the town and nearby villages; a European Parliament vice president put the number in the town itself at about 1,700. Neither figure can be verified. Ukraine's foreign minister says residents have survived on garden vegetables, canned food and even snails. People who got out are wary. A man who fled with his wife, son and cat six weeks ago, via Russia and Belarus, told Reuters he views the truce with deep skepticism. For Americans, Oleshky is a small test with a large audience. It is the first concrete deliverable of the current US push, and a First Lady initiative, landing days before talks the Kremlin says will not restrain its strikes.

🇪🇺 🇷🇺 European defense ministers met in Paris on Monday to say, in effect, that Washington's diplomatic push with Russia hasn't changed their read on the war, and in some cases has sharpened it. Kallas set the tone early: "The new diplomatic push is there, but it's also clear that Putin's actions tell a different story." She's expecting a "brutal winter" for Kyiv and said there's "no hope for imminent peace," which lines up with everything we've tracked on Russia's energy-grid targeting and the intercepted plan to force Ukraine's nuclear plants offline by hitting their switchyards. Germany's Boris Pistorius was blunter about the diplomacy itself: "No results whatsoever comes for those who want to negotiate with Putin... there is no signal whatsoever that Putin is looking for peace." That's a NATO defense minister directly contradicting the premise behind Witkoff's offer last week to broker direct Trump-Putin-Zelensky talks. The E5 format itself is the quiet story here. France, the UK, Germany, Poland and Italy, Europe's five biggest defense spenders, have met seven times since November 2024 specifically to coordinate Ukraine support and defense-industrial policy outside Washington's framework. Wes Streeting, five months into the job after Andy Burnham's government reshuffle, used nearly the same language UK defense secretaries have used all year, "we're with Ukraine until they win," while also naming Russia as a direct threat rather than just Ukraine's problem. France's Catherine Vautrin gave the meeting its concrete output: pledging "total transparency" with Washington while explicitly building European capacity in parallel, "produce more, produce faster... but we must already be planning for the conflicts of tomorrow." That's not rhetorical hedging, it's the logical extension of everything we've covered this month, the Patriot approvals stuck at the Pentagon, the Starshield restrictions, the early-warning gaps Zelensky raised with US senators. European officials aren't waiting to find out whether Washington's commitment holds. They're building the production base on the assumption it might not. Source: @POLITICOEurope