Zelensky Hands Melania Trump Ukraine's Top Women's Honor After Oleshky Ceasefire

Volodymyr Zelensky just pinned Ukraine's highest honor for women on America's First Lady. The Order of Princess Olga, 1st Class, went to Melania Trump for what the presidential decree called her

significant personal contribution to humanitarian support for Ukraine.

The timing is no accident. The award lands right after a ceasefire in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, which opened the door for several hundred people to evacuate the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky.

Russian and Ukrainian delegations are due at the White House on Thursday — on Melania Trump's invitation. The White House says she

independently initiated engagement between the two warring nations and successfully secured a ceasefire,

calling it an unprecedented diplomatic move for an American First Lady. Both sides have thanked her for brokering the deal, though neither has spelled out how deep her involvement ran. The event is scheduled for 16:00 GMT, when Melania Trump will deliver remarks on the Oleshky ceasefire. The guest list is heavy: Ukraine's human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets and Russian counterpart Yana Lantratova, plus Ukrainian MP Davyd Arakhamia and Russian official Kirill Dmitriev. Lubinets and Lantratova traveled into Oleshky together last week — a rare show of Russian-Ukrainian cooperation. Arakhamia, who leads Zelensky's party in parliament and worked informal White House-Moscow contacts during the ceasefire, according to Ukrainian media citing diplomatic sources, has confirmed he's coming. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov named Lantratova and Dmitriev as Russia's delegation; Dmitriev is a businessman close to the Kremlin and a regular in US-brokered talks. Even for seasoned negotiators, this kind of senior-level sit-down rarely gets convened by a First Lady. Lubinets kept it cryptic on social media while announcing his trip: