O’Flaherty said people in Oleshky face a high risk of death. He reminded that under international humanitarian law, Russia, as the occupying power, is obliged to supply the population with food and medicine and to facilitate the delivery of aid.
Earlier, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed that aid deliveries to Oleshky were supposedly being hindered by Ukraine, although the city has been under Russian occupation since the first days of the full-scale invasion.
The Insider quotes journalist Elena Gnitetskaya from Kherson region, who stays in touch with the city’s residents. According to her, aid was delivered more or less normally at the end of May 2026, and the next two attempts to deliver it in June and September ended tragically: in one case a drone attacked the convoy, and in the other a vehicle hit a mine.
Gnitetskaya says there were dead and wounded in these incidents — among volunteers and among the people they were trying to evacuate. According to her sources, around two thousand people may still remain in Oleshky, including 50–70 children, but it is difficult to determine the exact number because people hardly go outside.
She said that food in the city is bartered in makeshift places, and meals are cooked over open fires to avoid attracting drones. According to her, there is no gas, water is not always available, gas cylinders are very expensive and are not being delivered, there has been no electricity for a very long time, communications sometimes disappear for weeks, and there is nowhere to buy fuel for a generator; solar panels, she said, can also be dangerous because they show drones where people live.
Gnitetskaya added that medicine is simply not being brought into the city, and mostly elderly people with chronic illnesses remain there. There is a hospital, but there are almost no medical workers there, residents are afraid to go there, the morgue has been full since summer, some bodies are taken farther from the Dnipro, and severe unsanitary conditions persist around the city; a wounded person, she said, often simply bleeds to death because in the deserted city no one notices the injury right away.
She also said that, according to her sources, Russian soldiers in civilian clothes may be among the civilians, and residents have reported house robberies, with soldiers taking men’s clothing and shoes so as not to attract attention. According to her, her relatives in other frontline villages saw movement of Russian military equipment, after which missiles struck the occupied settlement, and then media outlets quickly filmed stories about shelling of the civilian population.
Gnitetskaya stressed that it is wrong to simply say that people chose to stay under occupation: many are afraid of failing filtration, and during her own occupation they checked phones, likes, banking apps, and contact lists. She also cited cases where a person was detained because of a Ukrainian flag in a friend’s avatar or an old conversation from before the full-scale invasion, and added that the roads are mined, that sometimes 20 kilometers must be walked under the open sky, and that for elderly and less mobile people even two kilometers on foot is an enormous ordeal.
According to her, there are also those in the city who support Russia, but many Ukrainians remain, who even with limited communications look for news about the corridor, and rumors about it are not always confirmed. Gnitetskaya also said that in winter, when garden supplies run out and there will be nothing left to barter, money there will effectively be worth nothing, and if nothing changes, a truly terrible famine may begin.
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