FLOTUS Could Win Nobel Peace Prize her Husband Craves

It would be a delicious turn of events if the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to First Lady Melania Trump for her successful negotiation and execution of a humanitarian ceasefire in the Oleshky battlespace.

The six-day ceasefire, which ended Nov. 1, allowed roughly 750 Ukrainian civilians to leave the besieged city.

Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets put his stamp on the ceasefire itself.

“Throughout this period, both sides honored their commitments.”

When the operation ended, the first lady framed it as a first step.

“The ceasefire across Oleshky and the surrounding Kherson region has provided residents with the freedom to move, access to food, clean water, medicine, plus a renewed sense of dignity without the constant threat of attack,” she said.

“Let Oleshky become a starting point for lasting peace,” she said.

The president has made no secret of his own ambition to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Speaking at his Oct. 25 rally in Port Huron, Michigan, Trump repeated his peacemaker credentials.

“I settled eight wars, and I got two more coming.”

During the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly said he would have prevented the intervention of Russian conventional troops in Ukraine. He also said that if he were returned to the White House, he would end the conflict in a single day.

Trump said he laments his failure, which he owns, as he did when speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Oct. 20.

The president said he underestimated the animus between the two presidents, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

“The hatred between President Putin and President Zelenskyy is tremendous,” he said. “I think that’s more of the reason they haven’t been able to make a deal.”

Would the Norwegians take delight in recognizing Mrs. Trump’s diplomatic success in a conflict that has vexed Mr. Trump?

The first lady learned about the situation when she attended September’s United Nations General Assembly meetings with her husband, President Donald J. Trump.

Oleshky is a Ukrainian town under the control of Russian forces, close to the front and across the Dnipro River from Ukrainian-held Kherson. This pocket of the war is in southern Ukraine, near the Black Sea in Kherson Oblast and north of Crimea.

Essentially, there is a stalemate, with each side held in check by mines, drones and artillery. Ukrainian forces are on the north riverbank, and Russian forces are on the south riverbank.

The Ukrainian drone-and-artillery siege of Russian forces in Oleshky compounds the logistical challenges. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are hesitant to launch a direct assault because of the approximately 2,000 civilians who remained from a pre-2022 population of 24,000.

In this way, the civilians functioned as human shields protecting their own captors.

On the other hand, in a development completely in character with this war, Ukrainian drones help prevent the Russians from resupplying their troops while also ferrying food and other supplies to the city’s civilians.

Russian forces took the city in the opening days of their intervention in the Ukrainian Civil War, but since then, nothing has changed.

It was the first lady’s idea to engineer the ceasefire through existing humanitarian channels to remove 34 children from the city.

Both opposing militaries established teams to coordinate the removal of the children and the other civilians seeking to leave aboard a convoy of buses escorted by Ukrainian police cars.

The streets were lined with cheering Ukrainians waving flags as the buses passed. When the Oleshky civilians stepped onto Ukrainian sovereign soil, many collapsed in tears, acknowledging that one of their nightmares was over.

Six days of peace in a small corner of this hellscape can be dismissed as a rounding error, but one day, this war may actually end.

If that day comes, it could be that the Trump who brought about the beginning of the end was the one in stilettos.