Hunger in occupied Oleshky: Ukraine’s foreign minister calls for urgent evacuation

What happened

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X on September 26 that people in the temporarily occupied town of Oleshky in the Kherson region are starving, with almost nothing left to eat. Citing available reports, he said civilians are being forced to survive on grass and weeds, while medicine, clean water, electricity and medical care are becoming ever harder to get. Children are among those living in these conditions.

Sybiha said responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe lies entirely with Russia, which illegally occupied the town. He urged the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other organisations to use their mandates and channels to secure immediate, unhindered humanitarian access and safe evacuation for everyone who wants to leave.

How many people remain

Oleshky lies on the occupied left bank of the Dnipro River, close to the front line. According to the head of the town’s military administration, Tetiana Hasanenko, quoted by The New Voice of Ukraine (NV), about 2,000 people remain in the town itself and about 6,000, including 182 children, across the wider community and nearby villages. Before the full-scale invasion, around 24,000 people lived in Oleshky. Five settlements in the community have been completely destroyed, she said.

As early as June, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine reported that no food had been delivered to the town since May 26 and that the last grocery store had stopped regular trading in January. It recorded at least 29 civilians killed and 54 injured in Oleshky and Hola Prystan in 2026 alone, mostly by short-range drones and landmines, while noting that it could not conclusively establish responsibility for individual attacks.

Accounts from inside

Journalist Oleh Baturin, who spoke to people who recently left, wrote that there have already been cases of death from starvation. According to their contacts, residents boil and eat purslane from their gardens and rarely leave their homes. His sources did not confirm media reports of people eating dogs or rats, though he cautioned that poor communications, mined roads and danger from the air mean residents may not know what is happening elsewhere in town.

Why evacuation has stalled

Human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets told NV that Ukraine had proposed a ceasefire to evacuate civilians, with designated officials on both sides to stay in direct contact, but Russia had not followed through. On September 16 he said a clear evacuation procedure and a verified list of 358 civilians in urgent need had been agreed. Some residents, he said, are trying to escape on foot across mined ground.

On September 25, Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Michael O’Flaherty called for an immediate local ceasefire, humanitarian access and evacuation, recalling that under international humanitarian law Russia, as the occupying power, must provide the population with food and medical supplies. Sybiha thanked him for the attention but added: “People there cannot survive on words of concern.”

What next

The Kherson and Mykolaiv regional administrations, with support from the UN refugee agency UNHCR, are setting up a transit centre in Mykolaiv to receive evacuees during the autumn and winter. In the past month alone, the Kherson administration says, 238 people, including 20 children, were evacuated from dangerous areas of the region.