Oleshky truce over, Russia and Ukraine strike each other online too

The humanitarian truce that took effect on October 27 in the Oleshky area, in the Kherson region, ended on November 1 as planned, after six days: the longest ceasefire recorded since the start of the war in 2022. This is reported by Sky TG24, which cites the Russian Ministry for Emergency Situations and Kyiv’s Center for Strategic Communications, and Corcianonline, which carries a dispatch from the Adnkronos agency: two independent sources that converge in confirming the end of the agreement.

With the expiry of the truce, Russian forces resumed military operations on the city of Kherson. A Russian drone struck a car in the Korabelny district, wounding two civilians. It is the first documented episode of violence after the end of the six-day window during which fighting in the area had been suspended.

On the diplomatic front, U.S. First Lady Melania Trump announced on X that the humanitarian operation carried out in Oleshky allowed the evacuation of nearly 800 people from the area. Trump described the conclusion of the mission as positive:

“The ceasefire has ended. The mission was a success” — Melania Trump, First Lady of the United States

The statement, released just hours before the resumption of hostilities, frames the truce as a successful fixed-term operation on the humanitarian level, distinct from the broader picture of the conflict that continues.

Parallel to events on the ground, a cyber front involving both countries opened in the same hours. The Russian Ministry for Emergency Situations reported a massive cyberattack against its own warning application, intended to inform the population of risks and emergencies. In the same timeframe, Ukraine confirmed that it too had suffered a hack of its air-raid warning system, the tool used to alert the population to ongoing raids. Kyiv’s Center for Strategic Communications attributed the attack to Russia.

The two reports thus arrived in close succession and on ground different from that of conventional military operations: civilian warning systems, which in both countries serve to signal to the population the arrival of imminent danger. It is not clear, based on what has been reported so far, whether the two episodes are linked to one another or constitute independent initiatives carried out by the respective sides.

The picture emerging from these latest hours is therefore one of two parallel tracks: on one hand, the end of a localized and temporary truce, agreed to allow a humanitarian evacuation and respected for its entire planned duration; on the other, the immediate resumption of conventional military operations on Kherson, accompanied by an episode of reciprocal cyber conflict directly affecting the civilian warning infrastructure of both countries. It remains to be seen whether the hacking episode will have operational consequences for the warning systems in the coming days, a point that neither of the sources consulted has yet clarified.