Reports of Starvation in Occupied Oleshky Highlight Deepening Humanitarian Collapse
Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister says some residents of Russian-occupied Oleshky are eating grass and weeds amid severe shortages of food, medicine, clean water, electricity and medical care, and is urging the UN and Red Cross to respond to what he calls a humanitarian crisis caused by the occupation.
Conditions in Russian-occupied Oleshky have deteriorated to the point where some civilians are reportedly surviving on grass and weeds, according to Ukraine’s foreign ministry.
Deputy Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said residents of Oleshky face acute food shortages and, in some cases, are being forced to eat vegetation. He described medicine, clean water, electricity and medical care as increasingly unavailable, and stressed that children are also caught in this situation.
Sybiha directly blamed Russia’s occupation for the crisis, describing it as a humanitarian catastrophe created by the unlawful takeover of the town. He called on the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international organizations to intervene.
A parallel statement in Ukrainian highlighted the same picture: civilians in temporarily occupied Oleshky are said to be starving, with almost no food left, while access to medicines, clean water, electricity and medical care is steadily shrinking. It again emphasized that children are among those affected and reiterated that this suffering has a clear cause in Russia’s occupation.
The reports depict a town where normal supply chains and services have broken down, leaving residents without reliable food, healthcare or basic utilities. Under international humanitarian law, an occupying power is responsible for the welfare of civilians in territory it controls, including access to food and medical assistance.
For Kyiv, publicizing Oleshky’s plight aims to increase diplomatic pressure on Russia and to push global institutions to seek access. The immediate questions are whether any independent monitoring can verify the scale of deprivation and whether Russia allows humanitarian organizations into the town.
Signals to watch include follow-up statements from the UN and ICRC, satellite or other independent reporting on conditions in Oleshky, and the emergence of similar accounts from nearby occupied communities along the Dnipro.
Sources
- OSINT