Four kilometres from food, they eat weeds: Russia's siege is starving Oleshky

OLESHKY — Four kilometres from life, there is death by slow starvation. In the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, on the left bank of the Dnipro river facing Ukrainian-held Kherson, some 2,000 civilians are trapped in a siege the world has largely stopped watching. The last confirmed delivery of food and medicine entered the city on May 26, according to Tetyana Hasanenko, head of Oleshky's Ukrainian military administration. Since then, roads have become nearly unusable — mined, shelled, and watched by drones. "People can't get out, food can't get in, and sick and injured are not getting the medical assistance they need," the UN's human rights monitoring mission wrote in a June report. Residents describe life as "equivalent to hell on earth." Families survive on a single meal a day; some have begun cooking garden weeds to meet their daily needs, the BBC reported. One trapped woman, Khaliya, said simply: "There is no food in the city. I eat once a day, dinner only. I make simple bread, sometimes I can eat it with a tomato, or with a little honey, and tea. That's all." Among those who remain are 45 to 50 children, suffering malnutrition in a city with no functioning schools. Only one hospital operates, at partial capacity, serving mainly for urgent amputations. Volunteer Ksenia Arkhipova, who keeps a record of the dead, says her list now holds about 1,200 names — "sometimes I don't have time to update it, because the list grows by one or two people every day." Two civilians, a husband and wife, were killed in a drone strike on September 20 while carrying a bag of food from the neighbouring town of Radensk, after failing to return before curfew. Oleshky was occupied in 2022. After Russian forces destroyed the Kakhovka dam in June 2023, the city was flooded and left without electricity, gas or running water — a deprivation that never ended. Evacuation routes are mined; rescue volunteers have been blocked. Ukrainian volunteers say the Russians, who once brought supplies for propaganda, no longer take the risk — and now loot the population instead. The Kremlin acknowledged the supply difficulties this week, then blamed Kyiv. "The Kyiv regime is doing absolutely everything to obstruct deliveries," spokesman Dmitry Peskov said — a description of the occupation his own military enforces. Ukraine's Council of Churches has appealed to Pope Leo XIV to help save the city from starvation. Siege as a weapon is not new in this war. What is new is how little it now takes to look away. A city of 24,000 has been reduced to a few thousand people eating weeds within sight of a river they cannot cross. The drones watch the roads. The mines wait in the fields. And the children of Oleshky go to sleep hungry — again, and again, and again.