The US First Lady Melania Trump’s laudable latest effort to rescue children from the battered city of Oleshky in the Kherson region in southern Ukraine has not come a day soon. Commencing Tuesday, the ceasefire Ms Trump has brokered between Washington and Kiev sets out to deliver humanitarian aid flows to arrest the unfolding catastrophe in Oleshky and to facilitate the evacuation of the few remaining civilians.
Oleshky was among the cities that fell to the Russians on the first day of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Since desperate shortages of food, medicine, and electricity have forced residents to take dangerous escape routes through landmines and air raids. In 2022, the city was inundated by waters from a dam that was bombed in an enemy explosion, killing hundreds. Its population of 24,000 before the war has now dwindled to about 1,700, including 47 children, says the head of the UN Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.
The grave situation prompted Kiev’s Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha to remember the Holodomor, the Soviet-orchestrated Ukrainian famine between 1932 and 1933 when 4 million people died.
Friday’s Oleshky ceasefire marks a breakthrough of sorts for the US First Lady after her intervention during the Alaska Summit between the American and Russian leaders in August 2025, consequent to which eight children were reunited with their families. One particularly diabolic dimension to the catastrophic war since 2022 has been Russia’s abduction of thousands of children with the avowed objective of raising them as Russians.
The most notorious of these incidents being the bombings of residential buildings in Mariupol city and the Donbas region. The abductions were characterised as bearing signs of genocidal intent, and the International Criminal Court served an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of personal responsibility.
In pursuit of her signature campaign, and coinciding with Washington’s monthly rotating term as head of the UN Security Council, Melania Trump became the first spouse of a world leader to preside over the apex body’s meeting this March, which focused on the safety of children in the world’s conflict zones.
Overhanging the event were the horrendous air strikes that hit a girls’ school in southern Iran in the ongoing US-Israeli war against Iran that killed 165 people. Detractors and critics of the US were quick to emphasise the cruel irony in the First Lady’s initiatives and the war-monger President wielding the sledgehammer on several aid programmes targeting children’s education and welfare. Even the agency to monitor the impact of armed conflicts on children for the Secretary General and UNICEF has not been spared these cynical manoeuvres.
In any case, it is a dangerously misleading myth that civilians, still less children, could be protected from the ravages of catastrophic wars pursued by rapacious arms-dealers and bloodthirsty dictators.
