Evacuees from Russian-occupied Oleshky arrive in Ukraine

Residents of the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky have arrived in Ukraine after being evacuated during a US-brokered ceasefire.

Residents, some draped in Ukrainian flags, disembarked buses and tearfully embraced their loved-ones.

In a post on the Telegram app, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked the United States and US First Lady Melania Trump for their mediation.

"When the world pays attention, people are rescued. Further steps toward de-escalation and real progress toward peace are also needed," Mr Zelensky wrote.

The city in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, occupied by the Russian military since 2022, had been caught in intense fighting between the two sides that had left residents unable to escape and starving.

Announcing the ceasefire last week, US First Lady Melania Trump described the city as being "on the brink of disaster" and said that without her intervention, bringing aid to its beleaguered residents would have been "impossible".

The truce is the longest pause in fighting between Russia and Ukraine anywhere on the front line since Russia invaded its neighbour in February 2022, and comes more than four-and-a-half years into a conflict that has left hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians dead.

Ukrainian and Russian officials visited the town together yesterday, delivering aid and marshalling those who wanted to leave in a rare show of cooperation between the warring sides.

Residents were evacuated via Belarus, having arrived there earlier today, Ukrainian negotiator Dmytro Lubinets said.

"We will be home soon," he said.

Captured by Russia in 2022, locals in the city had faced food, water and medicine shortages for months, while some were forced to hunt and eat pigeons, former residents told AFP.

Around 2,000 residents - compared with 24,000 before the Russian invasion - were still in Oleshky ahead of the humanitarian operation, according to Ukraine's estimates.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine has specified the number of people evacuated, and authorities in both countries previously indicated that many residents wished to remain in the city, even in the event of renewed fighting.

The truce is due to end tomorrow evening.

Russia, which denies targeting civilians, now occupies around a fifth of its neighbour: the Crimean peninsula, which it annexed in 2014, most of the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk - collectively referred to as the Donbas - and large parts of the southern Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.

US-mediated talks between Russia and Ukraine are set to resume in November, having been effectively frozen since the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran in February.

The conflict has become Europe's deadliest since World War II.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, Russia fired more than 100 drones overnight, according to the Ukrainian air force.

The capital Kyiv was suffering electricity shortages again, following Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure the day before, private Ukrainian energy provider DTEK said.