MYKOLAIV, Ukraine (AP) — A localized ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia took effect early Tuesday ahead of a humanitarian mission brokered by U.S. first lady Melania Trump, as missile attacks resumed in Kyiv.
The local pause in fighting started at 3 a.m. to allow an aid mission into the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky in southern Ukraine later this week.
Click to Gallery
FILE - First lady Melania Trump speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House, Oct. 19, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
Emergency workers clear debris and damaged road infrastructure near a destroyed car following a Russian overnight strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
Emergency workers clear debris and damaged road infrastructure near a destroyed car following a Russian overnight strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
In this undated image from video provided by the Ukrainian 34th Separate Marine Brigade "Borysfen" on Sept. 30, 2026, destroyed cars are seen on a highway from the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky in the Kherson region of Ukraine. (Ukrainian 34th Separate Marine Brigade "Borysfen" via AP)
In this undated image from video provided by the Ukrainian 34th Separate Marine Brigade "Borysfen" on Oct. 4, 2026, Ukrainian soldiers at an undisclosed location in the Kherson region of Ukraine attach a parcel of supplies to a drone before a flight to the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky. (Ukrainian 34th Separate Marine Brigade "Borysfen" via AP)
In this undated image from video provided by the Ukrainian 34th Separate Marine Brigade "Borysfen" on Sept. 22, 2026, smoke rises from a residential neighborhood in the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky in the Kherson region of Ukraine. (Ukrainian 34th Separate Marine Brigade "Borysfen" via AP)
President Donald Trump, left, and first lady Melania Trump listen to a question from a reporter after casting their early-voting ballots for the 2026 midterm elections at the Palm Beach County Library in West Palm Beach, Fla., Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
According to her office, Melania Trump led talks with civilian negotiators from Russia and Ukraine after meeting with U.N. officials who briefed her on the situation in the town.
The aid mission is planned ahead of a new round of U.S.-brokered talks between Russia and Ukraine expected next month aimed at ending the war after more than 4½ years of fighting.
Up to 2,000 people are stranded in Oleshky with dwindling food and medicine. They are unable to leave because of explosive mines and drone attacks in the area, according to the U.N.
Russian and Ukrainian negotiators as well as the militaries of the two countries confirmed in separate statements that the ceasefire had begun.
The local ceasefire is due to last through Saturday, or longer, though deep mistrust between Russia and Ukraine has thwarted previous attempts at ceasefires.
Minutes after 3 a.m., multiple ballistic missile explosions shook Kyiv and air alerts sounded in multiple parts of the country.
Late Monday, the capital also came under attack, when Russian ballistic missiles damaged the grounds of a university in Kyiv, killing one person and leaving 10 injured, city officials said. In Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, authorities said attacks late Monday killed two people and injured four.
“It is important that the world sees that Russia is showing nothing but a desire to kill and continue waging war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote in an online post shortly afterward.
Oleshky is in the partially occupied Kherson region, about 550 kilometers (340 miles) southeast of Kyiv, where the Dnipro River separates Russian and Ukrainian forces.
It was captured by Moscow’s forces on the first day of their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Further calamity struck in June 2023 when floodwaters inundated the town due to a dam collapse.
Oleshky sits across the Dnipro River from the city of Kherson, the region’s administrative capital. Russian forces seized Kherson in the early stages of the 2022 invasion but retreated across the river several months later.
Negotiators involved in the aid mission said doctors, medicines, food supplies and water would be taken to Oleshky before evacuation corridors are opened.
FILE - First lady Melania Trump speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House, Oct. 19, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
Emergency workers clear debris and damaged road infrastructure near a destroyed car following a Russian overnight strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
Emergency workers clear debris and damaged road infrastructure near a destroyed car following a Russian overnight strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)
In this undated image from video provided by the Ukrainian 34th Separate Marine Brigade "Borysfen" on Sept. 30, 2026, destroyed cars are seen on a highway from the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky in the Kherson region of Ukraine. (Ukrainian 34th Separate Marine Brigade "Borysfen" via AP)
In this undated image from video provided by the Ukrainian 34th Separate Marine Brigade "Borysfen" on Oct. 4, 2026, Ukrainian soldiers at an undisclosed location in the Kherson region of Ukraine attach a parcel of supplies to a drone before a flight to the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky. (Ukrainian 34th Separate Marine Brigade "Borysfen" via AP)
In this undated image from video provided by the Ukrainian 34th Separate Marine Brigade "Borysfen" on Sept. 22, 2026, smoke rises from a residential neighborhood in the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky in the Kherson region of Ukraine. (Ukrainian 34th Separate Marine Brigade "Borysfen" via AP)
President Donald Trump, left, and first lady Melania Trump listen to a question from a reporter after casting their early-voting ballots for the 2026 midterm elections at the Palm Beach County Library in West Palm Beach, Fla., Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
CORINTH, Miss. (AP) — President Donald Trump campaigned Monday in Mississippi, as he continued a closing midterm rally blitz that has highlighted Republicans' challenges ahead of an election that could drastically shift power in Washington and statehouses across the country.
“I'm here because Cindy’s doing great, but I just got to make sure. I can’t take a chance,” Trump told the crowd, his voice audibly hoarse, as he worked to boost Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who is facing a surprisingly stiff challenge from Democrat Scott Colom.
Colom was spotted at the rally site, too, creating the rare spectacle of Trump's staunchest supporters interacting directly with a figure the president would soon go on to denigrate as a “Marxist radical” and “fake" and “shameless phony who pretends to be a moderate” from the stage.
Mississippi, among the nation’s most reliably Republican states, is not where the Republicans envisioned needing a late-October stop from the president. But Colom is one of many Democratic underdogs who have managed to expand the House and Senate battleground maps because of widespread voter discontent over inflation, the Iran war and other aspects of Trump’s second presidency.
He said he had planned to go to the rally site to listen to what was on Trump supporters' minds.
"They actually deserve a senator that will listen to them, that actually cares about what they think, actually cares about what they’re going through,” Colom said ahead of the president's arrival.
Trump's event kicks off a week of aggressive campaigning that will include more stops in states he won comfortably in 2024, including Texas, South Carolina and Iowa. Trump also plans to hold a rally Saturday in Salina, Kansas, officials announced late Monday, marking his second visit to the state in less than two weeks.
Top Democratic candidates and their surrogates were also greeting voters — more than 30 million of whom have already cast ballots, according to data collected by The Associated Press from election administrators across the country — as they try to end Republicans' threadbare majority in the House, reclaim control of the Senate and claw back power in state capitals.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats' 2024 presidential candidate, campaigned in Wisconsin with Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who faces Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Trump ally, in the governor's race. If elected, Crowley would be the first Black governor to lead the battleground state.
“This is a tight race because the stakes are so high,” Harris said at an event billed as a “Women for Crowley” rally.
Meanwhile, in Michigan, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed distanced himself from an ad created by a group called Rebellion PAC that blames high grocery prices on U.S. support for Israel.
“This ad is not affiliated in any way with the Abdul for Senate campaign,” a spokesperson for El-Sayed, Roxie Richner, said in a statement about the spot, which features a couple discussing U.S. support for Israel as they shop for groceries.
“Apparently it’s costing us a lot of money to drop bombs on Gaza,” the woman says.
The ad had been condemned by U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, who narrowly lost to El-Sayed in the Democratic primary.
The way to win Michigan “is not by blaming the high costs of our goods on the only Jewish homeland in the world,” Stevens wrote on X.
El-Sayed, who would be the country’s first Muslim senator, has denounced antisemitism while fiercely criticizing Israel for its military operations in Gaza — a position that has been a frequent point of attack for both Republicans and supporters of Israel in his party.
Vice President JD Vance returned to Kansas to stump for Sen. Roger Marshall, who finds himself in a tight contest with Democratic nominee and pastor Adam Hamilton. Hundreds of people were gathered inside the warehouse of a steel-fabricating company in north Topeka in a state where Democrats haven’t won a Senate race since 1932.
Marshall, who has raised far less money than Hamilton, told the crowd that Trump is on the ballot, even if his name doesn’t appear, because of how Democrats will thwart his agenda if they win control of Congress.
“Democrats are coming out like it’s a presidential year,” he said, calling on the GOP to match Democrats’ energy.
Jace Sullivan, a 50-year-old electrician from Topeka who describes himself as “85% Republican,” said Trump supporters need to “circle the wagons” and get out to vote.
Wearing a red “JD Vance for President 2028" shirt, he said he thinks Trump is rightly working to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons.
“Gas prices are high and it does suck, but it’s a means to an end,” Sullivan said.
Trump, at the Mississippi rally, said he had, in fact, expected gas prices to rise even higher than they had.
“It worked out fine and it’ll be over soon,” he said of the war with Iran.
Earlier, Vance was in Belgrade, Montana, to campaign with Republican Aaron Flint, who is facing Democrat Sam Forstag in the race for the state’s 1st Congressional District, and Republican Senate candidate Kurt Alme.
Despite the visits to ruby red states, Sen. Tim Scott, who serves as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told The Associated Press Monday that GOP candidates are “closing very strongly” in races across the country, including South Carolina, which Trump is set to visit for the second time in as many weeks to stump for GOP Sen. Darline Graham.
“One of the reasons why we will be in the majority is because he has invested the time and the energy on the campaign trail,” Scott said on the sidelines of U.S. Rep. Russell Fry’s 3rd Annual Freedom Fry event.
But it's Trump's visit to Mississippi that perhaps brings the midterm landscape into the sharpest relief with just a week of campaigning left.
To be sure, Hyde-Smith, who is vying for her second full term, remains the favorite in a state Trump won three times by an average of nearly 20 percentage points.
But Colom, a local prosecutor who would make history as Mississippi's first Black senator since post-Civil War Reconstruction, is looking to parlay inflation, Trump's lagging popularity and Hyde-Smith's mistakes into an upset.
Senate Democrats’ super PAC has been a late entry in the contest, with a $1.2 million investment. Mississippians have not chosen a new Democratic senator since 1947, and Democrats last won a Senate race there when that senator, the onetime segregationist John Stennis, won his last reelection in 1982.
In New York, meanwhile, one of the party’s most vulnerable House members pulled from Trump’s campaign playbook. Rep. Mike Lawler, who is in a tight race with Democrat Cait Conley in New York City’s northern suburbs, manned a McDonald’s drive-thru — mimicking something Trump did two years ago, even as Lawler has tried to emphasize his independence from the president.
Barrow reported from Atlanta and Colvin from New York. Associated Press reporters John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas; Meg Kinnard in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; Laura Turbay in St. Paul, Minnesota; Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix; Seung Min Kim in Belgrade, Montana, and Anthony Izaguirre in New York contributed.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at Women for Crowley event Monday, Oct. 26, 2026, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., talks before President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Crossroads Arena, in Corinth, Miss., Monday, Oct. 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
President Donald Trump arrives at a campaign rally at Crossroads Arena, in Corinth, Miss., Monday, Oct. 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
People watch as President Donald Trump's motorcade heads to a campaign rally in Corinth, Miss., Monday, Oct. 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
President Donald Trump yells as he arrives on Air Force One at Frederick W. Smith Airport, in Memphis, Tenn., Monday, Oct. 26, 2026, en route to a campaign rally in Mississippi. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Vice President JD Vance reacts after speaking at a campaign rally at Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport, Monday, Oct. 26, 2026, in Belgrade, Mont. (Finn Gomez/Pool Photo via AP)
Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, left, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, receives an embrace from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., at a campaign rally Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026, at Lincoln Park Middle School in Duluth, Minn. (AP Photo/Erica Dischino)
President Donald Trump arrives to speak during a campaign rally at McMorran Place Sports and Entertainment Center, Sunday, Oct. 25, 2026, in Port Huron, Mich. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
