Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha appealed on Saturday evening to the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other humanitarian organizations to secure safe evacuation corridors and immediate relief access to the southern Ukrainian town of Oleshky, which remains under Russian military occupation. Writing on his X account, Sybiha accused Russian occupation forces of deliberately converting the urban center into a “death trap,” asserting that Kyiv’s repeated warnings “cannot continue to go unanswered.”
The Foreign Minister detailed severe humanitarian deprivation on the ground, stating that local hospital facilities have completely exhausted their medical supplies. At the same time, dozens of corpses remain abandoned in streets and residences because Russian forces have prohibited their burial. According to Sybiha, starving families are enduring severe shortages and have been reduced to surviving on leftover garden vegetables, scarce canned rations, and snails.
According to a Reuters report, the Kherson region town housed roughly 24,000 residents before the outbreak of the war. Danielle Bell, head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, reported that only about 1,700 inhabitants remain in the town today, including 47 children. Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky characterized the engineered humanitarian conditions in Oleshky as “genocide.”
Reuters further reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged during a Friday conversation with Pope Leo XIV to cooperate in permitting essential civilian supplies into the town. With no direct ground access across frontline positions, the Ukrainian military has twice conducted precision airdrops of emergency food and medicine into the town utilizing aerial drones. While the Kremlin acknowledged severe, critical supply shortages in Oleshky as early as September, it claimed Russian forces were working to resolve the crisis.