A Town on the Occupied Bank
Oleshky lies on the left bank of the Dnipro, about eight kilometres across the water from Kherson. Until 2016 it was called Tsiurupynsk, a name dropped under Ukraine's decommunization laws. Around 24,000 people lived there before February 2022. The river now decides almost everything. It marks the line between Ukrainian-held and Russian-occupied ground, and Oleshky sits on the occupied side, joined to the regional capital by a bridge that has not carried ordinary traffic for years.
What reaches the town arrives by boat, by back road, or not at all. Aid convoys from Ukrainian-controlled territory cannot cross. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have repeatedly sought access and been refused or obstructed. Residents describe a place that has not been destroyed so much as detached — unplugged from the systems that make a city function.
After the Kakhovka Dam: Water as a Wound
The Kakhovka Dam (Kakhovska HES) collapsed on 6 June 2023, emptying the reservoir upstream and sending floodwater through settlements on both banks of the Dnipro. Oleshky was inundated. The flood did not simply drown streets; it killed the water supply. Pumping stations, wells and sewage lines went under water carrying fuel, fertiliser and corpses. Public health specialists use the shorthand WASH — water, sanitation and hygiene — and in Oleshky all three failed at once.
Floodwater leaves behind what epidemiologists call a faecal-oral transmission pathway. Cholera, hepatitis A, typhoid and rotavirus diarrhoea travel that route. Without chlorination or fuel to boil a kettle, the same water that irrigates a garden can put a family in bed for a week. Electricity is intermittent at best. No power means no pumps, no refrigeration for insulin, no sterilisation in the one clinic still nominally open.
Telegram Chats as Foraging Manuals
Hunger produced an unexpected kind of literacy. Residents of Oleshky, according to testimony gathered by the BBC and other outlets, began using Telegram group chats to identify wild plants. Someone photographs a leaf in a yard, posts it, and waits for an answer. Is this edible? Does it need boiling twice? Which parts are safe in June and which in September?
The plants in question are ordinary European weeds. Chenopodium album, known as lamb's quarters, fat hen or loboda, grows in almost any disturbed soil and carries real nutrition — vitamin A, calcium, protein. Urtica dioica, the stinging nettle, loses its sting after a minute in boiling water and yields iron and vitamin K. Taraxacum officinale, the dandelion, offers bitter leaves for salad and roots that can be roasted as a coffee substitute. Plantago major, broadleaf plantain, and Portulaca oleracea, purslane, turn up in the same chats.
The risks are real, and the chats know it. Lamb's quarters accumulates nitrates from soil, and oxalates in the leaves can aggravate kidney trouble. Several species in the Apiaceae family are deadly lookalikes: Conium maculatum, poison hemlock, has killed foragers who mistook it for parsley or wild carrot. Heracleum, hogweed, causes phytophotodermatitis — blistering burns that appear only after sunlight hits the sap. A wrong identification in a city without a working hospital is a death sentence delivered slowly.
The Mental Cost of Choosing
Scholars have a term for this. Rob Nixon called it slow violence: harm that unfolds gradually, out of sight of cameras, accumulating in bodies and households rather than in one dramatic event. The daily arithmetic of survival fits that description. Which weed is safe. Whether to burn the last firewood or save it for a cold night. Whether to trade a jar of preserves for antibiotics that may be counterfeit.
Barter economies under siege corrode trust in ways that outlast the siege itself. Neighbours who once shared freely begin to hide supplies. Resentment builds over who received the last aid parcel and who did not. The psychological load of permanent triage — deciding, every day, what to sacrifice — produces what clinicians call decision fatigue, and it looks a great deal like depression.
The Road of Death
Leaving Oleshky means running a gauntlet. Residents call the route out the road of death. First-person-view (FPV) drones, cheap and accurate, hunt vehicles and pedestrians. Anti-personnel mines scatter the verges, among them the small green PFM-1 devices nicknamed butterfly mines, which maim children who pick them up. Those who try to cross the Dnipro by small boat do it at night, often without an outboard motor.
Siege is not a new instrument. The blockade of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944 killed somewhere between 630,000 and one million civilians, most of them from starvation, and produced the same foraging culture — the same nettle soup, the same bartered bread. Sarajevo endured nearly four years of encirclement in the 1990s. Mariupol in 2022 showed how fast a modern city reverts when water and electricity stop. What differs in Oleshky is the quiet around it.
Data That Cannot Be Gathered
Casualty figures from occupied territory are close to unusable. Ukraine's Office of the Prosecutor General counts what it can, mostly from areas it controls. Russian-installed authorities publish numbers that serve their own purposes. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) rely on secondary sources. Nobody with a clipboard is walking Oleshky's streets.
That gap is not a footnote. It is the mechanism. A place with no verified deaths, no documented outbreak and no photographed famine does not appear in the funding appeals that keep aid moving. The absence of data is itself the injury — a humanitarian blackout that lets the deprivation continue unrecorded.
What Functional Erasure Looks Like
A city survives on boring things: a market, a transformer, a pharmacy with real medicine, a school, a bus that runs on time. Oleshky has lost most of them. Not through one bombardment but through the steady removal of every system that makes civilian life possible. Markets shut. Pensions frozen or paid in a currency nobody trusts. Teachers gone. Doctors gone.
People still live there. They plant tomatoes, boil nettles, charge phones from car batteries, and wait for a crossing that may or may not be open. Calling them victims of war is accurate and insufficient. What is happening to Oleshky is the slow dismantling of the conditions under which a person can remain a civilian at all.
