Nearly two months had passed without any food deliveries to the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky when Maria Zakhavko decided she and her husband had to leave.
Before setting out, they dropped off the food they had been able to gather for Zakhavko's elderly parents, who were too frail to make the 12-mile trek across mined and corpse-strewn roads to the next town. They had to wait for an evacuation -- if one ever came.
"See you soon," Zakhavko recalled saying, hopefully. Then, on Aug. 17, she and her husband set off on the first leg of what would become a much longer journey to safety, aware that not everyone made the trip safely.
Once a city of 24,000 people on the southern bank of the Dnipro River, Oleshky is now at the center of a humanitarian crisis.
All year, food supplies have dwindled as mines and drones made the road increasingly impassable, cutting contact between Oleshky and the outside world. The last volunteers bringing food arrived in May. After that, residents said, several vehicles hit land mines on the road to Oleshky, and the volunteers stopped coming.
Roughly 2,000 civilians are now effectively trapped in Oleshky, according to Ukrainian officials, who maintain contact with residents by phone. The city has been under Russian control since the first days of the full-scale invasion, in 2022.
The remaining residents live off vegetables they grow in their gardens, soups of boiled weeds and cans of food they scavenge from bombed-out, abandoned homes around this city. Some periodically make the harrowing 25-mile round-trip journey deeper into Russian territory to Radensk, the nearest town where they can buy supplies. The road is impassable for cars, but can still be traversed -- at great risk -- by foot or bicycle.
Ukrainian troops have periodically delivered food and other supplies by drone from across the river, though Ukrainian officials say Russian forces sometimes intercept the packages, or punish those caught receiving them. Russian troops also move into locals' apartments and eat whatever they find, according to residents who got out earlier this year.
"The Russians are essentially using these civilians as a human shield," said Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, deputy head of Ukraine's Kherson Regional Military Administration. "By remaining behind civilians, it makes it easier for them to shell our side of the river. They don't even feed them -- we send food ourselves, and risk losing drones." Each drone used for food deliveries, he said, costs roughly $22,000.
In an email to The Wall Street Journal, the Kremlin said there were only 200 civilians in Oleshky and that Ukraine was preventing them from leaving and blocking food and water deliveries. "The village is blockaded by the Ukrainian Armed Forces," the email said. "The Russian army continues to deliver supplies there using heavy drones."
Life in Oleshky, located just across the Dnipro River from Kherson, has been difficult for much of the occupation. In 2023, Russians blew a nearby dam, submerging much of the city in water and washing land mines and other munitions into residential areas.
Russian troops moved into the city, and Ukrainian forces shelled it. Electricity, water and gas were all cut. Most residents left. Those who stayed, most of them elderly, got used to cooking over open fires in their courtyards and the sound of drones buzzing overhead.
Last winter, food began to run low as fewer volunteers braved the road to deliver supplies. At the small market near the hospital, prices skyrocketed -- $17 for a dozen eggs, according to residents. After the volunteers stopped coming altogether, the search for food grew desperate.
Olena Solovyova, 50, said her father in Oleshky moved in with a neighbor last winter -- his house had no wood-burning stove, so he had no way to heat it once the gas was cut.
As food ran low over the summer, she said, he decided to make the journey by bicycle to Radensk. He repaired the bike and set off with a group who knew the way. The trip back took six hours, because he was walking with 70 pounds of food -- though there was no meat available to buy.
"He said drones were flying overhead the entire time," Solovyova said. The road has since been more heavily mined, she said, and several residents who tried to make the trip in late September were killed. It is unclear whether Ukrainian or Russian forces are laying the mines.
Since last week, Ukrainian forces delivered roughly 10 tons of food and other supplies by drone.
Tetiana Hasanenko, the head of Oleshky's city military administration, who is based in Ukrainian-held territory, said the missions weren't announced beforehand, though officials messaged some residents privately that the shipments were coming. In the past, Russian forces had tried to intercept the drones.
"The occupiers shoot down the drones, and they take the food packages for themselves," she said, adding that they also punished people who collected the food. "They consider it cooperation with the Armed Forces of Ukraine."
Oleshky's hospital remains open, but is short of medicine and other supplies.
Solovyova said a former teacher of hers, who remains in Oleshky, was injured by shrapnel in September. She was quickly carried to the hospital, but doctors lacked supplies to stop the bleeding and ultimately had to amputate the leg.
"The basement is full of bodies," Solovyova said of the hospital.
Zakhavko's husband began scavenging for food in abandoned apartments early this year. The buildings were mostly ruins, she said, and some were full of mines and unexploded shells.
"It was very common -- people had no other choice," she said. "We had to go into these dangerous places and look for food, because we were hungry."
Once, he found a jar of cherries, which they shared for breakfast. Another time, he brought back a sack of flour. "God knows how that survived," she said.
Zakhavko and her husband had resisted leaving Oleshky in large part because they didn't want to abandon her parents. But by midsummer, her parents were insisting that it was time for them to go.
In July, her husband made the journey to Radensk for supplies for the first time, along with a few other men from the area. "I thought I was going to lose my mind waiting for him to come back -- I was so worried," she said.
"It was an incredibly difficult decision," she said. "But they kept saying, 'We will wait for an evacuation. You need to start building a new life.'"
Her husband made one more trip to Radensk, in early August, to load up her parents with supplies before they left. The mines were denser now: He spotted an antipersonnel mine on a path that had been clear two weeks earlier.
They departed at 7 a.m. on Aug. 17, carrying only two light backpacks with their computers, jewelry, some clothes and a little food.
The road was completely destroyed, Zakhavko said, with blast craters every few feet and utility poles lying across it. They passed burned-out cars and stepped carefully around downed drones, with unexploded munitions still attached. Next to one of the vehicles, she saw a corpse. Then later, another.
Eventually, they turned off the road onto a path through the forest. She passed below a drone tangled in a tree. Other drones zipped overhead, flying in every direction. Zakhavko heard an explosion nearby -- she couldn't tell how far away.
"We were constantly looking around us, watching where we stepped," she said. "We couldn't stop and rest. We had to keep moving."
Seven hours later, they made it to Radensk. In the weeks since, they made their way out of the occupied territories and out of Russia.
They are among the most recent residents to make it safely out of Oleshky, though others are continuing to attempt to make the journey. Ukrainian officials recently posted a video, which they said showed residents trying to leave the city by motorbike.
"I worry about my parents constantly now," Zakhavko said. "There are hundreds of people there who simply aren't capable of leaving."