By Halyna Hergert | 2026-06-09

In the occupied Ukrainian town of Oleshky, people are starving to death. Bodies lie in the streets. Stray dogs have begun feeding on human remains. Residents face a choice with no good options: stay and risk dying of hunger or exposure, or attempt to flee along roads lined with mines and patrolled by drones.

Oleshky sits on the left bank of the Dnipro River, directly across from Kherson. Before Russia's full-scale invasion, the wider community of 13 settlements was home to roughly 40,000 people -- a thriving area known for agriculture, wetlands, one of Europe's largest deserts, and proximity to the Dnipro.

Today, fewer than 6,000 people remain, and only about 1,800 of them live in the town itself: predominantly the elderly, people with limited mobility and around 50 children. Five settlements have been completely destroyed. Several others are 80% gone.

The town survived catastrophic flooding after the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam. Then, last December, a total blockade cut it off from the outside world entirely.

Hunger and cold

Even the few commercial delivery trucks that break through cannot ease the crisis. Most residents have run out of cash. Reaching the nearest cash machine means an 80-kilometer (50-mile) journey to Skadovsk, along mined roads under constant drone attack.

"People are doomed; even when they look at food, they have no way to buy it," Tetiana Hasanenko, head of the Oleshky City Military Administration, told Kontur.

Winter deepened the crisis. With no electricity, gas or functional heating, residents melted snow for water, rationed firewood, and tried to survive in freezing homes.

"My relatives told me it was three degrees Celsius in the bedroom. Water froze right inside the house," Ukrainian journalist Mariia Semenchenko told Kontur.

Hasanenko compared the situation to the Holodomor, the Soviet-era famine that killed millions of Ukrainians.

"The arrival of summer brought no relief. What should people do now — boil grass, like they did during the famine of 1933?" she said. "Russia brings nothing but evil and death."

"No one needs to wonder where hell is after death," she added. "It is already here and now."

A road with no return

Attempting to flee has become just as deadly as staying. Kseniia Arkhipova, an Oleshky native who survived the occupation, regularly receives pleas to evacuate residents dying of hunger, and she knows the desperation behind them is real.

Arkhipova described a recent tragedy involving people she knew personally. Four residents of Sahy, a village near Oleshky, set out on bicycles toward Radensk -- a journey of over 20 kilometers (12 miles) -- just to find food. Among them was 25-year-old Mykola Shaptsov, who had spent months trying to get on an evacuation list. Russian soldiers had destroyed his Ukrainian passport, and occupation authorities never issued him a Russian one.

"Kolya was blown to pieces. They buried him right there, by the highway. They just buried him in pieces," Arkhipova told Kontur. Another woman in the group died alongside him. Mykola's mother survived but lost both her legs.

"It is a one-way trip," one local woman told Hasanenko when describing the escape route. The same woman described losing her neighbor within minutes. "I walked outside just 10 minutes after speaking with her on the phone, and instead of my neighbor, her intestines were hanging on the fence," Hasanenko recounted.

"Every single day in Oleshky, it's seven, eight, three, four dead. Every single day," Arkhipova said.

Bodies in the streets

The Oleshky hospital runs entirely on generators, with no stable electricity, water or medical supplies. Only three elderly doctors remain. Russian forces destroyed approximately 20 ambulances along what residents call the "road of death" over the last six months -- targeting newer Russian-supplied vehicles as well, killing medics alongside patients.

"If someone suffers a severe injury, like a traumatic amputation from a landmine, it is effectively a death sentence," Hasanenko said. A victim's only hope, she added, is that a rare passerby spots them and loads them onto a garden wheelbarrow.

Bodies pile up in the hospital basement for months. Forensic autopsies, required before burial, must be performed in Skadovsk, but the vehicles carrying the dead have repeatedly come under fire. With summer heat setting in, residents now fear epidemics.

Corpses lie along roadsides, and residents are too afraid to approach them.

"A body lies on the roadside at the exit of Oleshky. Passersby do not stop because they fear a drone will hit them next," Semenchenko said.

Hasanenko has a photograph documenting a dog eating an unidentified corpse on the road. The animals now hunt the living.

"One woman rode her bicycle carrying cookies specifically to distract any dog that might lunge at her. But the dogs, having already tasted human flesh, no longer care for such treats," Hasanenko said.

Attempts to coordinate evacuations have produced nothing. Arkhipova handed evacuation lists -- covering the elderly, people with limited mobility, and those without identity papers -- to Ukrainian authorities in March. Two months later, the sole action taken by the Russian Red Cross was a phone call to verify applicants' identities.

"Nothing is going to happen; there will be no Red Cross. We already saw Olenivka, we already saw Mariupol -- where were they?" Arkhipova said.

Ukraine's Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets said he proposed a humanitarian evacuation during Russia's declared ceasefire from May 9 to May 11, even offering to accompany the convoy personally to guarantee Ukraine's compliance. Russia did not respond.

"I never got a response, either official or unofficial," he told Deutsche Welle on May 19. "We are continuing negotiations."