After nearly five years of war, Russia and Ukraine now agree on at least one thing: They should keep Melania Trump happy.
Last month, Mrs. Trump, the first lady, emerged as a dark horse diplomat when she announced a local cease-fire that would allow for the evacuation of hundreds of people from the frontline Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, which was facing a starvation crisis.
The six-day truce, the first of its kind since Russia’s all-out invasion in 2022, was the product of an unconventional foreign policy intervention by an American first lady. It was all the more remarkable for a presidential spouse who has at times disappeared from the public eye and rarely comments on international affairs.
And it was in keeping with her recent efforts to construct an image as a humanitarian, including through her association with a campaign to return children from Russia to Ukraine.
Mrs. Trump’s exact role in negotiating the cease-fire remains murky. On Thursday, she was expected to discuss her efforts publicly for the first time at a meeting in Washington with a small delegation of Russian and Ukrainian representatives who helped execute the evacuation. The first lady’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Officials from Russia and Ukraine have insisted that she and her team, including her longtime gatekeeper, Marc Beckman, spent weeks in talks with both sides and were pivotal to the final agreement. Ukraine had publicly called for urgent aid to be sent to the city and had sought help from various groups, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, when the first lady intervened.
In the end, the Ukrainian and Russian governments decided that it was in their interest to work with Mrs. Trump and deliver her a humanitarian victory. Doing so would address two challenges: It would resolve the deepening disaster in Oleshky while also presumably helping in their dealings with Mrs. Trump’s unpredictable husband, President Trump.
Just as in their interactions with Mr. Trump, the two sides seem to know what is expected of them in working with his wife, going to great lengths to invoke Mrs. Trump’s name as often as possible. In separate news conferences after the evacuation, the Russian and Ukrainian officials who led the efforts praised her effusively, describing her as essential to the mission.
“We wouldn’t have done it without Melania Trump and her team,” Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian human rights ombudsman, told reporters this week. “I am saying this absolutely seriously.”
His Russian counterpart, Yana Lantratova, delivered a similar message to journalists in Moscow.
“I express my gratitude to the first lady of the United States,” Ms. Lantratova said. “Indeed, through that mediatory role, it served as a kind of guarantee for our joint agreements.”
“We had constant, regular phone calls,” she added. “It was negotiated and detailed in our agreement. It specified everything down to how our buses would travel.”
Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and his spokesman repeatedly thanked Mrs. Trump for her humanitarian efforts. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine went much further, awarding her the Order of Princess Olha, First Class, the highest honor that Ukraine can be bestow upon a woman.
Mrs. Trump’s efforts were not the only ones in pursuit of a cease-fire. Pope Leo XIV also sought a truce, including in a call to Mr. Putin from a hospital where the pontiff was recovering from surgery. Ukrainian officials say that much of the work had already been done before the pope intervened.
“With all respect to all other parties — we are very grateful for phone calls personally from the pope to the president of the Russian Federation and separately grateful for the call to our president,” Mr. Lubinets said. “But at that time when all this was happening it was the final stage.”
The meeting being convened by Mrs. Trump at the White House on Thursday was likely to be a somewhat uncomfortable affair for the Ukrainian and Russian officials, putting them in the same room as the war between their countries only intensifies, with no end in sight. Ukraine has charged in absentia Ms. Lantratova, who will be in attendance, for what Kyiv said was her role in transferring children from the occupied Kherson region of Ukraine into Russia.
But the event demonstrates the lengths Ukraine and Russia are willing to go to please her as they both frantically try to curry favor with Washington. Thursday’s event precedes a separate track of meetings that the Trump administration is holding in the United Arab Emirates next week. Those peace negotiations would be the first since February involving all three countries.
Some observers have wondered whether the success of the brief cease-fire around Oleshky could serve as a confidence-building measure as the United States aims to restart talks to end the war.
The Kremlin has cautioned that this was a specific humanitarian operation and that no immediate evacuation plans were in the works for other besieged towns, although efforts to feed and care for people who opted to stay in Oleshky may continue. And Mr. Zelensky has pointed to recent Russian attacks as evidence that Moscow does not see the short truce as a step toward any larger agreement.
Russia in recent days has hammered Ukraine’s energy grid, plunging major cities, including the capital, Kyiv, into darkness. That has intensified fears that the coming winter could be Ukraine’s hardest yet of the war.
Also this week, a Russian glide bomb attack on a school being used as a humanitarian hub in southern Ukraine killed at least 42 people, with another 30 still missing. That attack is shaping up to be one of the deadliest against civilians during the entire war.
Mr. Lubinets has emphasized that the Oleshky cease-fire was exclusively a “humanitarian track” and that “there were no agreements about political steps” in pursuit of a settlement to the war.
He said he first learned that a crisis was unfolding in Oleshky last February, when pleas poured into his office to help arrange the evacuation of residents or food deliveries. That process began to truly take shape “only when Melania Trump joined,” he said.
The main obstacle was building trust that a cease-fire would hold on both sides. Mr. Lubinets offered to be the first Ukrainian official to travel with his Russian counterpart into occupied territory during the war. Joining the mission himself — which he ultimately did — would ensure that Russia understood that Ukraine would hold its fire, he suggested.
“The American side liked this idea,” he said, adding that it was offered as Mrs. Trump received daily briefings on the talks.
He and Ms. Lantratova signed separate documents, his in Ukrainian and hers in Russian, agreeing to the temporary truce. Washington acted as the guarantor. After the cease-fire took effect early on Oct. 27, the Ukrainian and Russian representatives met online to monitor it, and agreed that it was holding. That allowed them to proceed with removing mines that littered the area and later with the evacuation.
Mykola Bilieskov, a political analyst with Come Back Alive, an organization that supports Ukraine’s military, said the evacuation of Oleshky was “a rare case where interests of all aligned.”
He said it was unlikely that the warring sides would be able to “replicate this local success within this big framework of negotiations.”
Still, he added, “We have no choice — we need to dance this dance.”
Ivan Nechepurenko and Valerie Hopkins contributed reporting from Moscow.
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