Besieged by Hunger, Drones and Landmines: Life and Death in Occupied Oleshky

In the Russian-occupied southern Ukrainian town of Oleshky, survival has become a daily gamble against starvation, explosive hazards and aerial attacks. More than four years after the Kherson region settlement fell under Russian control, the roughly 2,000 residents who remain have now endured two and a half years without electricity, running water, natural gas or functioning healthcare, according to testimony gathered by Al Jazeera. The town's plight, described by residents and Ukrainian officials, illustrates the severe humanitarian toll of the war on civilians living behind the front lines.

For Vera Gulyaeva, a 64-year-old retired schoolteacher, the catastrophe became personal in March, when a Russian drone struck a bread distribution line in the town. The attack killed several people and gravely wounded her husband, Serhiy Gulyaev, a 63-year-old former driver. The couple had met at a friend's wedding in 1985 and had built a small house together in Oleshky, where they kept an orchid, a vegetable patch, five hens, a water well and a generator powered by expensive gas bought from middlemen. Even after their children fled to areas under Kyiv's control, they were reluctant to abandon their home.

Gulyaeva recalled that she rarely left the house, while her husband occasionally ventured out to buy bread. The March drone strike left him with deep wounds to the skull. A first attempt to transport him to a hospital 80 kilometres away in Skadovsk failed when the ambulance struck a landmine on the road. A second attempt days later succeeded in reaching medical care, but Gulyaev died in the hospital. His wife recovered his remains, had them cremated and brought his ashes home before eventually leaving the town. She now lives in western Ukraine with her daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, while her son serves in the Ukrainian military.

The bread-line attack is one of many incidents that residents say have turned ordinary errands into life-threatening ordeals. Gulyaeva left behind family photographs, friends and neighbours, several of whom have since died. She described a town where people have consumed all the food they had stockpiled and where starvation is now widespread. After four decades of teaching at the elementary school she herself had attended as a child, she said she still cannot comprehend how people can kill other people.

Some Oleshky residents subsist on whatever they can grow, hoard or scavenge from abandoned apartments and houses. Others attempt the 20-kilometre journey to the neighbouring village of Radensk, where the nearest functioning grocery shop operates. That route, however, has proven lethal for some. A former resident who fled but remains in contact with people still in the town told Al Jazeera that Russian drones and landmines have killed civilians. Bodies left lying in the open, the source said, are eaten by feral dogs.

On a single Thursday, the town recorded four casualties. Two people were killed and two injured as they tried to reach Radensk, with the wounded brought back on a wheelbarrow and a bicycle. Ukraine's human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, summarised the dilemma in a Telegram post on Saturday, writing that Russia leaves civilian residents with a daily choice: stay and starve to death, or leave and risk being blown up by a landmine.

The situation has drawn international attention, with European officials citing Oleshky as evidence that Kyiv should not surrender territory to Moscow. Kaja Kallas, the European Union's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said on September 28 that calls to simply give up occupied territories ignore the human consequences. When someone asks why Ukraine does not just cede these areas, she said, it sounds simple, but in reality it is about the people who will suffer on those territories.

Russia has consistently denied targeting civilians throughout the war. The Kremlin has acknowledged that a humanitarian crisis exists in Oleshky but places the blame on Kyiv. On September 20, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed that problems delivering food and medical supplies persist because the Ukrainian government does everything possible to thwart such deliveries, and he asserted that drones are constantly present in the area. The source article ends mid-sentence at that point, with Peskov's remarks continuing beyond the available text.

The accounts from Oleshky underscore the broader humanitarian crisis in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, where residents are cut off from basic services and dependent on precarious supply routes. Food deliveries conducted by drone have been documented in the area, including footage released on September 27 by Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration, showing unmanned aircraft carrying food packages over a location identified as Oleshky. The Reuters-supplied image was partially verified through architectural and road features matching archived and satellite imagery, though the date of the footage could not be independently confirmed.

For the remaining residents, the combination of hunger, unexploded ordnance and drone activity has created a closed trap with few safe exits. The journey to Radensk, a 20-kilometre trip that would ordinarily take little more than an hour on foot, has become a mortal risk. Those who stay face dwindling supplies and no reliable access to medical care, while those who attempt to leave must navigate roads littered with mines and skies patrolled by drones. The town's pre-war population has collapsed to a fraction, and those who remain are largely elderly or otherwise unable to flee.

The testimony of Gulyaeva and others portrays a community severed from normal life and from the outside world. With no electricity, running water or gas, residents rely on wells, generators and improvised arrangements. The absence of healthcare means that injuries from mines or drone strikes are often fatal even when the initial blast is survived. The deaths of neighbours and the abandonment of homes have left entire streets empty, while feral dogs roam among the dead, according to accounts relayed to Al Jazeera.

International humanitarian law prohibits attacks on civilians and requires parties to conflicts to allow unimpeded access for relief supplies. The competing narratives from Kyiv and Moscow over responsibility for the suffering in Oleshky reflect a wider information battle, but the practical reality for residents, as described by those who have escaped, is a daily struggle for food and safety. European officials have seized on the town's condition to argue against territorial concessions, framing the fate of occupied communities as a central moral question in any negotiated settlement.