In the occupied town of Oleshky in Kherson Oblast, people are foraging for grass and picking through bombed-out basements for anything to eat, Natalia Soboleva, an Odesa volunteer who tracks the town, says, Espreso reports. The city turned 942 years old this week and marked the day, as it has more than two hundred before it, under a Russian blockade that lets no food in and no one out.

The starvation is engineered. Oleshky, on the Russian-held left bank of the Dnipro, was flooded when Russia blew the Kakhovka dam in 2023 and has been sealed off since late 2025, its roads mined and its aid convoys fired on. In July, OSCE monitors confirmed the blockade, describing a place where the living starve and the dead go unburied.

According to Kherson Regional Administration Head Oleksandr Prokudin, in Oleshky, hundreds of people remain, elderly, children, while food deliveries have all but stopped for months, and Russian forces prohibit the evacuation.

Residents forage through the ruins

Soboleva describes a population reduced to scavenging.

"People walk around gathering grass and cooking whatever they can, going through wrecked basements looking for scraps of food. There is hunger there, real hunger," she said.

Hundreds of abandoned animals are starving, too, and the residents who remain share what little they scavenge with them.

Russia shells the aid convoys

The blockade is enforced with fire. Russian forces attack the humanitarian vehicles that try to bring in food and water, Soboleva said.

The last attempt, on 1 September, ended with Russian troops shelling four volunteer cars. The turn for the worse came around January and February, she said, after a food run from Kopani was hit last summer, killing people and halting deliveries for good.

No corridor lets anyone leave

The one thing that could save the town, its officials and volunteers agree, is a guaranteed humanitarian corridor, and Russia will not grant one.

Volunteers, working with Ukraine's human rights ombudsperson, have twice collected lists of residents who want to leave, and the lists were reportedly cleared with the Russian side, but the occupiers still refused to open a route.

"We have not forgotten Oleshky, or the unspeakable pain the city's residents are living through," Prokudin said, adding that Ukraine keeps pressing to get people out.

The Ukrainian soldiers simultaneously perform defensive, logistical, and humanitarian functions. Ukraine’s Third Army Corps is launching a separate AB3.HUMANITARIAN initiative to evacuate civilians from frontline settlements. This means saving families, elderly people, children, people with disabilities, from Russian attacks, and those who often have no way to leave on their own.

Recently, the 3rd Army Corps, led by Andrii Biletskyi, the Azov founder, has been tasked with stabilizing the Donetsk front, where Russia is battering the fortress cities that have held since 2014. As that fighting grinds toward towns like Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the civilians still living in them have to be moved, often under fire.

Robots and boats reach cut-off towns

The corps says its soldiers already regularly pull residents out of settlements near the front. The hard part is the routes: roads watched by Russian drones, approaches too dangerous for a bus or an ambulance. To work them, the evacuation teams use ground robots, armored vehicles, motorboats, and whatever else the terrain demands, reaching places that an ordinary rescue cannot.

Unmanned ground vehicles have become a fixture of Ukrainian evacuations, part of a wider shift in which the military ran more than 100,000 robot logistics and evacuation missions in the first eight months of 2026.

A fund pays for more trips

Making it a formal mission is also about money. The corps' own Staff Fund is opening financing for the vehicles and equipment that the evacuation teams need. The corps expects this dedicated support to enable it to run more trips, into more places, more often, than volunteer improvisation allowed.

The corps urges people to leave early

The appeal underneath the announcement is blunt.

"Take care of yourselves and your loved ones, and leave in good time, because the lives of our people are the most precious thing," the corps wrote.

The plea matters because many who remain on the front line are the least able to move on short notice, and the window to reach them narrows every time the front creeps closer, while roads get more dangerous.