Oleshky, the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city on the left bank of the Dnipro River, is beginning to starve. Food supplies have not reached the city since late May, and the roughly 2,000 residents who remain — along with thousands more in the surrounding area — are trapped in a zone ringed by land mines and menaced by drones, with evacuation almost impossible. The New York Times reported on October 5, 2026, that the city is becoming a front-line famine.
A city under "total blockade"
Oleshky sits less than 10 kilometers from the regional capital, Kherson, across the Dnipro — yet it is cut off from the world. Ukrainian officials and volunteers describe a "total blockade": no functioning stores, no reliable electricity, drinking water or medicine. The nearest place where food can still be found, according to the residents who have managed to escape, is about 20 kilometers away in the village of Radensk. Roads around the city were heavily mined in December 2025, making even that journey a gamble with death.
Residents who have slipped through the siege paint a grim picture. "We eat once a day," one local wrote to the city's displaced Ukrainian administration. "We'll die this autumn for sure. I'm dying already, weakening with each day." Ukrainian volunteer Iryna-Ester Vratareva told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty the situation is no longer just critical: "It is hell."
"Hunger was Moscow's weapon then. It is Moscow's weapon now."
Kyiv has taken the crisis to the world stage. Addressing the UN Security Council on September 23, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Russia was "starving people while refusing to let them leave the occupied territories, using them as human shields." He described one resident, Alya, surviving on bread, and invoked the Holodomor — the 1932–33 Soviet-engineered famine in Ukraine — telling the council: "Hunger was Moscow's weapon then. It is Moscow's weapon now."
Ukraine's human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, said Kyiv had offered safe evacuation routes and a ceasefire regime, with the International Committee of the Red Cross ready to act as a third party. "Russia's response to all proposals is 'no,'" he said, adding that the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations has appealed to Pope Leo XIV to intervene.
According to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, no food supplies have reached Oleshky since May 26, 2026. Ukraine's Foreign Ministry says the city's population has collapsed from around 24,000 before the war to approximately 2,000, including dozens of children.
Drones become lifelines
With ground access impossible, Ukraine is flying supplies in. During the night of October 4, soldiers from the 11th Mykhailo Hrushevsky Brigade and the 34th Kherson Regiment of the National Guard carried out a second drone operation over the blockaded city, delivering about 400 packages totaling nearly four tons of food, medicines, and children's supplies.
Ukraine used heavy-lift drones to deliver food and medicines to Oleshky at the end of September, distributing supplies at 100 locations across the city. Foreign Minister Sybiha wrote: "There is a message in every package that reaches Oleshky — Ukraine does not forget its people." Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, deputy head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration, told CBC News the aid could sustain residents for up to a month — but warned the solution could be short-lived, adding that Russian troops had forcibly seized supplies from civilians in some cases.
The Kremlin has acknowledged that Oleshky faces "critical problems" with food and medicine supplies, while insisting Russia's military is working to resolve them. Ukrainian intelligence, meanwhile, says Russia is preparing staged videos in which residents would be forced to claim on camera that they are well-fed and grateful to the occupiers.
The takeaway: Four years into Russia's full-scale invasion, Oleshky has become one of the war's starkest humanitarian crises — a city where the front line is not just the Dnipro, but hunger itself. Whether drones can outpace a deliberate blockade will decide whether its remaining residents survive the coming winter.
Watch
Watch RFE/RL's video report on the siege: 'It Is Hell': Ukraine's Russian-Occupied Oleshky Starves Under 'Total Blockade', which shows the humanitarian catastrophe and Ukraine's drone aid drops into the embattled city.
Reel music: "Hitman" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 3.0.