Ukrainian forces have delivered around 4 tonnes of food to the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky in the Kherson region by drone in one of the largest such operations of the war, as roughly 2,000 remaining residents face what international organisations have described as a worsening humanitarian catastrophe. Oleshky has been under Russian occupation since the early days of Moscow's full-scale invasion in February 2022. No food has reached the city through regular channels since May of this year, according to ground reports.
Meanwhile, Russian forces are blocking civilians from evacuating and actively obstructing drone deliveries. Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson regional military administration, said troops are shooting down food-carrying drones, confiscating or reselling supplies that reach the ground, and detaining residents found with humanitarian parcels. Soldiers are conducting house-to-house searches for dropped food, residents report.
Ukrainian forces have been delivering aid by drone across the Dnipro since March, the regional administration said. The location and timing of individual operations are withheld for security reasons. Ukrainian troops hold positions on the right bank of the Dnipro, several kilometres from the city.
The regional military administration puts the population still in Oleshky at around 2,000, including nearly 50 children, down from 25,000 residents before Russia's all-out invasion in early 2022. The All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organisations estimates more than 6,000 people remain in the city and surrounding area, including around 200 children. Ukrainian officials say anyone suspected of contact with Ukrainian authorities or armed forces faces immediate execution.
Conditions in the city have deteriorated sharply since the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam in June 2023, which flooded large parts of the region, destroyed hundreds of homes and blocked wells and sewage systems. At least 200 to 300 people died in Oleshky in the flooding alone. Residents now rely primarily on their own gardens for food, face chronic medicine shortages and move between abandoned buildings to avoid drone raids and looting by Russian troops, according to reports from the city.
"People are lying on the roads, rotting, unburied. Today in the basement of the hospital, the very one that has had no electricity for four years now, there are more than 100 corpses," Tetyana Hasanenko, an employee of the Oleshky city military administration, told ABC News. The 34th Separate Marine Brigade "Borysfen," involved in the drone deliveries, published footage from the city in April that it described as showing a settlement Russian forces had "turned into a ghost town".
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