Trapped and starving: Around 2,000 civilians remain in Russian-occupied Oleshky

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Oleshky was home to around 24,000 people. Russian forces occupied the city in the first days of the invasion. Then, in June 2023, the destruction of the Kakhovka dam flooded the area, leaving Oleshky without centralized water supplies, electricity or gas.

Now, the only road into the city is mined and watched by drones. Food and medicine have not been regularly delivered since May, according to Tetiana Hasanenko, head of the Oleshky City Military Administration. Residents who remain are mostly elderly people with limited mobility and those who care for them.

For some, hunger has made the danger of leaving preferable to staying.

In early September, after drones destroyed a convoy carrying food toward the city, residents walked seven kilometers along a mined road to salvage what remained: burned potatoes, a little onion and flatbread soaked by rain.

Last week, 11 residents made an even more dangerous journey on foot to the neighboring village of Radensk, around 20 kilometers away. One woman was transported in a garden wheelbarrow.

They made it out alive.

When food runs out

For those who remain in Oleshky, finding enough to eat has become a daily struggle.

Alla Lykhman-Malysh runs an animal shelter in the city with donations and has stayed because she cannot abandon the animals in her care. In a Facebook post in early September, she wrote that residents had spent weeks waiting each morning for vehicles carrying food to reach the city.

They never came.

“People survived the summer somehow on cucumbers and tomatoes. We ate our fill of zucchini pancakes and eggplant patties,” she wrote. But with the growing season ending, she said, residents had exhausted what little reserves they had.

One relative of journalist Mariia Semenchenko, who remains in Oleshky, now drinks water in the morning, eats one meal during the day and has grapes for dinner.

In late September, his lunch was soup cooked outside on a wood-burning stove: soaked beans, a potato, a tomato and a pepper fried in margarine manufactured five years ago and recently found in a basement.

There is no cooking oil, flour, grain, tea or coffee.

Once, he told Semenchenko that he dreamed about ice cream. On another occasion, someone gave him a packet of instant coffee.

“He said he enjoyed it so much,” she recalled.

Another of Semenchenko’s relatives managed to leave Oleshky in May. By the time she reached Kyiv after traveling across Europe, she was so thin that clothes belonging to Semenchenko’s 9-year-old daughter fit her.

On her first day there, she wanted to go out and buy bread herself.

“I said, ‘I can run and get it.’ She stopped me: ‘No. It’s important to me that I can go and buy bread myself,’” Semenchenko recalled.

For weeks afterward, she ate bread between meals, repeatedly asking her family to cut her another piece.

Animals are starving too. Residents have seen stray dogs eating grapes and vegetables from gardens. People feed their pets boiled snakes when they can catch them, while some dogs are being poisoned by their owners to spare them a prolonged death from starvation.

Almost no cats remain in the city, according to Semenchenko’s relative. Stray dogs have killed many of them.

When money loses its value

Food can still occasionally be found at Oleshky’s market, but supplies are scarce and prices have soared.

A kilogram of potatoes, onions, sugar or salt costs around 1,000 rubles ($12). Ten eggs cost about 1,500 rubles ($18), while a kilogram of margarine produced in 2021 was recently offered for 2,000 rubles ($24).

But increasingly, having money does not mean there is anything to buy.

“Money has almost no value there because people rarely have anything to sell,” Hasanenko said. “People survive through barter.”

Two kilograms of sugar, for example, might be exchanged for 10 eggs.

The market has also taken on another role. With Oleshky largely cut off from communications, residents go there to exchange news - to learn who has been killed and whether there is any prospect of evacuation.

Around 100 bodies in a hospital basement

The basement of Oleshky’s hospital now serves as a makeshift morgue. Around 100 bodies are being kept there, according to Hasanenko, some of them since winter.

The normal process of burying the dead has largely broken down.

Russian occupation authorities had required bodies to be taken to another town for examination before issuing a death certificate and allowing a burial. But as the number of deaths has risen and ambulances have stopped operating, some residents have begun burying their dead in shallow graves in their gardens.

Stray dogs sometimes dig up the graves.

The hospital itself has almost no medicine left. Doctors can do little beyond stopping bleeding, Hasanenko said, even as residents continue to suffer injuries amid ongoing attacks.

There is effectively no emergency medical service: ambulances have long stopped responding to calls.

No safe way out

Ukraine has been trying to arrange an evacuation from Oleshky, but no safe route has yet been established.

Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said on Sept. 16 that an agreement on evacuating civilians had been reached with Russia and that the International Committee of the Red Cross was prepared to assist. But he said there had been no further response from the Russian side.

“These people need to be saved. The city has turned into a death trap,” Lubinets said.

His office had received 176 appeals concerning the humanitarian situation in Russian-occupied parts of Kherson Oblast and identified 358 people who urgently needed help to leave.

Some residents are no longer waiting for an organized evacuation.

“The most frightening thing is that people are already walking through mined fields on their own,” Lubinets said. “They risk being blown up by a mine or hit by a drone, but they still go because staying in Oleshky is even worse.”

Attempts to deliver food by drone have also proved dangerous. Hasanenko said Ukrainian forces had tried dropping supplies into the city, but Russian forces either intercepted the packages or identified the homes where they landed and accused residents of cooperating with the Ukrainian military.

According to Hasanenko, one family was detained after receiving such a delivery. Their whereabouts remain unknown.

For residents who stayed in Oleshky, leaving through Russian-controlled territory carries risks of its own.

Semenchenko said some residents lost their identity documents when their homes were flooded after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam or later destroyed by shelling. Others refused to obtain Russian documents.

Many also distrust evacuation organized by the occupation authorities, fearing they could be taken deep into Russia. Men face an additional fear of being forced into the Russian military.

And even reaching another occupied town does not solve everything.

“You need documents, because without them you won’t be given anywhere to stay. You need money,” Semenchenko said. “And if you travel farther, volunteers can help you - but where are you supposed to live? Not everyone has relatives.”

She said that while some collaborators and people who support Russia remain in Oleshky, that does not define the thousands of civilians still trapped there.

“It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight for our people under occupation,” Semenchenko said.

She fears time is running out.

“They will not survive this winter.”