Four months after Euromaidan Press first documented the drone siege of occupied Oleshky and neighboring communities, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and the Institute for the Study of War have independently confirmed the humanitarian crisis, major international outlets covered it, and the Pope has been informed. Yet interviews with residents, volunteers, and local officials indicate that conditions continue to deteriorate, with thousands of civilians trapped without food, medical care, or a safe way to leave.

International reports confirm the humanitarian catastrophe

Reports published by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and the Institute for the Study of War in late June and July 2026 point to a worsening humanitarian crisis in Russian-occupied Oleshky, where civilians face starvation as they remain trapped by drone attacks, landmines, and restrictions on movement.

On 25 June, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) called the situation in Oleshky and neighboring territories "desperate." Continuous first-person-view (FPV) drone attacks and extensive mine contamination have severely restricted the delivery of food, medical assistance and evacuations. Ukrainian authorities estimate that up to 6,000 civilians, including more than 180 children, remain in the occupied communities.

The mission documented at least 29 civilians killed and 54 injured in Oleshky and Hola Prystan in 2026 alone, most of them in attacks involving short-range drones.

"Frequent attacks by short-range drones and the presence of landmines are having devastating consequences for thousands of people in these communities," said Danielle Bell, Head of HRMMU. "People can't get out, food can't get in, and sick and injured are not getting the medical assistance they need."

HRMMU called for a local ceasefire to allow evacuations and the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Human Rights Watch reached similar conclusions. The organization documented severe shortages of food and medical care, the collapse of basic services, and constant danger from drones and landmines. Former residents said there was no organized evacuation route and that those leaving the occupied town had to pass through Russian military checkpoints before traveling through Russia and Belarus to reach Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Men who want to escape face a further trap: leaving in practice requires Russian travel documents, and applying for them, HRW found, funnels men straight to a military enlistment office. Compelling civilians in occupied territory to serve in the occupying power's forces is a war crime, the organization noted.

Human Rights Watch could not determine responsibility for individual drone strikes or the emplacement of specific mines in the area. The organization noted that Oleshky sits on the front line and has been subjected to sustained attacks by Ukrainian forces as well, and that it found credible indications Ukrainian forces may have used drones and mines on roads around the town. It said civilians wishing to leave are entitled to safe passage under international humanitarian law.

According to HRW, Russia, as the occupying power, is responsible for ensuring access to food, medical care, and humanitarian assistance.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) concluded that Russia is effectively blockading occupied Oleshky while failing to meet its obligations under international humanitarian law as an occupying power. The report mentioned that "the Russian military command deployed a detachment of penal recruits to Oleshky in early July, resulting in widespread abuses against the civilian population, including sexual assaults committed against women and minors."

On 15 July, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) reported that conditions "remain especially dire in the Russian-occupied frontline areas of Kherson region."

As of May 2026, around 6,000 residents, including approximately 200 children, remained in and around Oleshky and Hola Prystan, where witnesses described towns transformed into a combat zone. ODIHR also received accounts that Russian forces prevented residents from leaving Oleshky and used civilians to shield military positions.

The crisis in Oleshky and the surrounding areas has received growing attention in international media. The Washington Post described Oleshky as a town being slowly strangled under occupation, citing accounts from recently evacuated residents, and called the situation "unbelievably awful." Le Monde published a detailed report on the suffering of the civilians. The Times' dispatch is called Four years of horror in Ukraine's 'forgotten Bucha.'

Houses damaged by drones and artillery, Oleshky. July 2026. Photos provided by Ksenia Arkhipova.

Houses damaged by drones and artillery, Oleshky. July 2026. Photos provided by Ksenia Arkhipova.

Houses damaged by drones and artillery, Oleshky. July 2026. Photos provided by Ksenia Arkhipova.

On 16 July, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha raised the humanitarian situation in Oleshky and Hola Prystan during a meeting in Kyiv with the Vatican representative, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, stressing the urgent need for a humanitarian corridor to evacuate thousands of civilians. The same day, at a Vatican meeting of Nobel laureates, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk spoke about Russia's drone attacks on civilians in the Kherson region.

While the information blockade is broken, the siege continues.

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Reports from the ground

"Only one ambulance was able to leave Oleshky and come back since May 26," said Ksenia Arkhipova, the volunteer from Oleshky who helps to organize evacuation and speaks to the locals despite the problems with communication. "That's it. There is no food."

Arkhipova spoke to Euromaidan Press over the phone from her home in Ukrainian-controlled territory. According to her contacts in the occupied territories, the situation in the nearby villages has deteriorated dramatically. Civilians are reportedly killed while attempting to leave to buy food or bottled gas. Residents describe drones overhead that make leaving basements next to impossible.

These reports are confirmed by Oleshky Military Administration head Tetyana Hasanenko, also living in exile. She said that roads leading from villages farther from the Dnipro River, including Radensk, Chelburda, and Kostohryzove, have also become increasingly dangerous.

In Oleshky, the terror campaign is ongoing.

Three former residents speaking to their relatives have confirmed to Euromaidan Press that the newly arrived Russian military personnel are former convicts who loot and rob residents of the last food.

V., who recently escaped Oleshky and spoke to Euromaidan Press on the conditions of anonymity, said one man who lived alone was tortured to death in his basement; his neighbors found the body and managed to bury it. Others were beaten, and there are accounts of sexual violence, according to V.

The accounts were confirmed by Kherson's popular Telegram channel Kherson: Non Fake.

Posts appearing in the Oleshky community groups mentioned the robbery by former convicts. One post sought help for a dog "dying of hunger." The dog owner, who shared all the food with the pet, pleaded for evacuation.

"Now there is nothing left for people to eat," the post read.

According to Hasanenko, residents are on the brink of starvation. She described conditions in Oleshky as "hell on earth." She said the town's morgue had long been destroyed, around 100 bodies remained in the basement of the hospital for months because they could not be buried, and occupying authorities were preventing families from recovering the dead.

The reports point to the same conclusion: an urgent need for a humanitarian corridor to allow civilians to evacuate safely and humanitarian aid to reach those who remain.

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Maksym Dobrianskyi fought as a commander around Bakhmut and Avdiivka until 2023, when he stepped on an anti-personnel mine and lost a leg. He is now in mine action—one of a growing number of war-wounded Ukrainian veterans being retrained for the decades-long job of making their country safe to walk again.

Euromaidan Press heard him speak this month at a demining-technology exercise in Lviv Oblast.

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The Ministry of Veterans Affairs already counts well over a million veterans, a figure that climbs every month, and projects five to six million veterans and their families once the war ends. Set against a clearance task measured in decades—patient, ground-level labor—Ukraine is not short of people who could do the work, only of the money to hire them.

The effort that brought Dobrianskyi in is paid for one grant at a time. Its latest cohort, under a UNDP-backed program—40 specialists, many of them veterans with disabilities—began work in Kharkiv Oblast in January 2026 on 12-month contracts.

They are trained in non-technical survey and risk education: the unglamorous front end of demining, working out which land is dangerous and warning the people who live on it. An earlier round trained 22; 11 found work. The Netherlands and Luxembourg funded this one. How big the next one is depends on who funds it.

Russia’s war has left farmland larger than Croatia unusable, at a cost Kyiv puts at $11 billion a year—and by the government’s own reckoning, the job will take at least a decade, with some land never safe to return to at all.

Deputy Minister Ihor Bezkaravainyi, who coordinates the demining response, lost his own leg to a Russian anti-tank mine in 2015 and has argued that mine survivors make natural recruits for mine action. Dobrianskyi is what that argument looks like in a field.

He had braced himself, he says, for a life of sitting at home and grieving, until a leaflet at an employment center offered retraining. He would rather not remember the treatment, the rehabilitation, the prosthetics. What changed was the work and the people beside him.

“I was wounded, and I want to help people the same way,” he said, “so that this doesn’t happen.” The veterans he trained with, he added, are “like a family now.”

Forty of them got a year’s contract this round.

The cameras were up and the film was rolling, and so was the ScanJack 3500—the biggest machine on the field, four wheels, roughly the size of a bus. It crawled along the sandy ground for over five minutes, engine deafening, its chains churning the soil and raising a cloud of dust and sand, pace glacial, every lens trained on it and waiting.

When it finally reached its mine and set it off, the bang caught the whole press corps out: we twitched as one, then burst out laughing, a little sheepishly, at having flinched. It was the one moment all day that went exactly to plan—a machine doing on cue what the brochure promises—and we had been walked over specially to see it.

This was the second UTTC Technology Week, its media day of live trials on 17 June at a field in Lviv Oblast nobody would name. The Ministry of Defense staged it with the Ministry of Economy, Environment and Agriculture and the UN Development Programme, and the pitch was the future of demining: minefields cleared by drones, AI, and robots, with people kept as far from the bang as possible.

A swimming meet in the dust

The centerpiece was a “technology relay.” Whatever that would mean.

In the end, it was two teams—government operators on one side, commercial deminers on the other—turned loose on two plots, an open agricultural field and a wooded strip, apparently seeded with mines and tripwires.

Apparently, because for the time we were there, nothing on those plots went off. There was the roar of engines, the scorching sun that fried us where we stood, giant horseflies buzzing bloodthirstily around, and the machines spent half the time too far off or behind the trees and bushes to make anything out.

Drones whirred overhead and fed images to the screens in the nearby tent; a woman with a microphone narrated gamely, and still none of it resolved into anything I could follow. The officials kept insisting this was not a competition but an exchange of experience—a strange thing to say about two teams racing each other across a minefield.

I kept thinking of Raoul Duke—Hunter S. Thompson’s stand-in in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—out at the mad racing event called Mint 400, trying and failing to keep track of a race behind a wall of dust and chaos. I was not alone in this. During the debrief, one veteran of the event admitted he had stood at the edge of the same field with the same question I had: Okay, but what is actually going on here?

The cast

There were speeches, because there always are. Oleg Shuvarskyi of the Ministry of Defense opened by promising the equipment on show was no longer absurdly expensive—that it had, as he put it, more “earthly” prices now.

Then came Deputy Minister Ihor Bezkaravainyi, who lost his own leg to a Russian anti-tank mine in 2015 and now coordinates Ukraine’s demining response. He reached for Lao Tzu—governing a state, the saying goes, is like cooking a small fish—and then delivered the line he repeats like a mantra: mine action is not about demining. Demining is only part of it. The rest is economy, agriculture, environment, governance, the whole slow business of making land usable again.

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The UN’s people spoke too. Ben Lark, who runs UNDP’s mine action program here, framed the day as less about the machines than about getting operators, manufacturers, scientists, and donors into one field to argue with each other.

His research specialist, Edward Crowther, was bolder about the stakes: Ukraine, he said, is at the cutting edge of humanitarian demining technology worldwide right now. Coming from the organization writing some of the checks, it is the kind of claim worth holding at arm’s length—though on the evidence of the impressive-looking hardware rolling past, not an empty one.

The march of machines

Before the relay, there was a “march of technologies.” The whole arsenal passed us in single file—driven, flown, or, for the small things like experimental battery packs or smaller medical units, carried by hand.

Among them: the behemoth ScanJack 3500, different soil-tilling rigs and remote-controlled mowers, the medium MV-4 and the Neo ground robots, drones for visual and magnetic survey, an electromagnetic trawl for detonating mines from a distance, even a portable Vodafone base station for throwing up a signal in a field.

Most of it Ukrainian-made. A good deal of it still experimental, being tested and tweaked on this very ground, partially on this very day.

A quieter corner

At a separate briefing held for the small group of journalists present, in a calmer corner of the field, a veteran named Maksym Dobrianskyi told us how he came to this work. He fought around Bakhmut and Avdiivka, and in 2023, he stepped on an anti-personnel mine and lost a leg.

He had braced himself, he said, for a life of sitting at home and grieving. Instead, he found a leaflet at an employment center advertising retraining for wounded veterans as humanitarian deminers, and took it. He clears mines now.

“I was wounded, and I want to help people the same way,” he said, “so that this doesn’t happen.” Two men in the same field, both missing a leg to a Russian mine, both now spending their lives on it.

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Macarons and minefields

The lunch was warm—a choice of sausage or baked fish, spaghetti with herbs—and the spread around it was generous: fruit and vegetables, little cakes, macarons, different salads. We stood eating there in a dust-blown field while fat horseflies worked our arms and legs, and I felt the sunburn slowly but surely taking hold of my face and neck.

Russia’s war has affected roughly 133,300 square kilometers of Ukraine, including 57,900 square kilometers of farmland—an area larger than Croatia—at a cost Kyiv puts at $11 billion a year. Mines and unexploded ordnance have killed more than 400 people and injured over 1,000 since the full-scale invasion, by Ukraine’s own count.

Bezkaravainyi has said openly that parts of the country may never come back: a Ukrainian Zone Rouge to set beside the one the First World War left in France, or beside Chornobyl.

What the machines still can’t do

The jury’s sharpest verdict of the day was not praise but a wish list. Deminers are still hauling five or six separate robots to a site—one to fly, one to search, one to dig, one to blow things up—when what they want is a single universal machine that does it all. Whether it’s a realistic direction engineers are working toward or a sci-fi dream remains one of the day’s mysteries.

Another remark was that although at the exercise field the teams could freely use airborne drones for reconnaissance, in reality, it would be impossible near the front because such drones are not hardened against electronic warfare.

And the minister whose ministry helped stage the whole show is the same man who told me, a month earlier, that innovation has been far better at killing in this war than at cleaning up after it. Machines identify, Bezkaravainyi said. Humans still clear.

By the end of the day, I was sunburned, bitten raw by horseflies, and too fried to follow the closing remarks, which had drifted into the kind of shop talk only the people who do this for a living could love and understand.

When it was over, the buses took us back. Bone-tired as I was, I held off until we hit the main road and the signal returned, then grabbed my phone and frantically thumbed through a day’s worth of emails and messages, feeling naked after so long cut off from the world.