ODESA—For six hours, Tanya waited in her son’s attic as Oleshky filled with water. When a friend reached the house in a rubber boat, she swam out through the window. She was 61. A shell fragment had killed her husband in their garden the previous month. Now the river had taken her home.
Elsewhere in town, Russian soldiers were turning people back at checkpoints.
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Human Rights Watch collected accounts from sixteen residents and volunteers after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June 2023. People trying to escape were refused passage. Volunteers bringing supplies were denied entry. One resident recalled the explanation:
“Haven’t you been waiting it out hoping for Ukraine to come back? Go back and wait some more.”
That was Oleshky under Russian “protection”. More than three years later, Moscow is participating in an agreement to bring food into the city and evacuate some of those who remain. The operation could save lives. It also supplies the Kremlin with material for a remarkably cynical account of its occupation, beginning at the moment Russia permits relief.
Oleshky lies across the Dnipro from Kherson, close enough for its residents to remember an ordinary journey between the two. Before the invasion, people fished, tended gardens, and traveled by river. Around 24,000 lived there.
By fall 2026, roughly 1,700 to 2,000 people remained. Food and medicine were scarce. Electricity, heating, and running water were unavailable. The UN human rights office dated the
last regular food delivery by road to May 26.
The town’s history reaches back through several Russian attempts to rearrange the region. Its name recalls the medieval trading settlement of Oleshia. Zaporozhian Cossacks established the Oleshky Sich in 1711 after Russian imperial forces destroyed their previous stronghold. Soviet authorities renamed the town Tsyurupynsk in 1928. Ukraine restored the name Oleshky in 2016.
