Truce in Oleshky, missile hits a bridge in Kyiv: the war runs on two tracks

In recent hours the war in Ukraine has moved simultaneously along two tracks that do not intersect. On one side, a ceasefire agreed for humanitarian reasons in a specific corner of the southern front; on the other, a missile attack on the capital. Keeping them separate, without allowing them to offset each other in the same tally, is the only way to report them without distortion.

Russian armed forces halted fire in the Kherson sector from four in the morning, Moscow time, to allow a humanitarian operation to take place in the city of Oleshky, which is under Russian control. This is the concrete development of what yesterday was only announced: the localized ceasefire, confined to this area and to this declared purpose, is now actually in effect. It is not a general truce in the conflict, but a window opened for an evacuation and for the entry of aid into a defined perimeter.

In the same span of time, a Russian missile attack struck the Pivdennyi bridge in Kyiv. The reported toll is one dead and fourteen wounded. The episode on its own clarifies the boundaries of the Oleshky truce: it applies to the perimeter for which it was agreed, not beyond it. The Ukrainian capital remains under attack on the very day when, hundreds of kilometers to the south, a humanitarian operation is being carried out under a ceasefire.

On the diplomatic front, Ukrainian President Zelensky announced that a trilateral meeting with the United States and Russia will be held in November, in an attempt to unblock negotiations that until now had no set deadline. It is the first concrete date placed on the calendar for the resumption of three-way dialogue. On the same day, the presidents of Finland and Norway held a phone call with Russian President Putin on the war and on ongoing diplomatic efforts: a sign that the Nordic channel remains active in parallel with the US one, and that multiple actors are working along the same tracks at the same time.

The reconstruction of this day rests on two independent sources that recount different aspects of the same events: on one hand the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Ukrainian armed forces, which confirmed respectively the truce in Oleshky and the attack on the Kyiv bridge; on the other, the Kremlin and the presidential offices of Finland and Norway, which disclosed the call with Putin. These are not sources that confirm each other on the same facts, but sources that cover different portions of the same day of war: for this reason they must be read side by side, not one as verification of the other.

The picture that emerges adds up three distinct and autonomous elements: a humanitarian operation under way in the south of the country, an attack on the capital with civilian and military casualties not broken down by category, and a diplomatic calendar that for the first time points to November as the month of a possible three-way meeting. None of the three elements cancels out the other two, and none of the three allows the outcome of the others to be predicted. The trilateral meeting announced by Zelensky remains, for now, the only diplomatic appointment with a reference date on the calendar of the war.