U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters on October 10 that Ukraine needs to find a new president who can “make a deal.”
“You know what I suggest? I suggest they get a new leader who could make a deal because he could’ve made many deals and for some reason he never does… I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new President.” Trump said.
Trump said the U.S. told Zelensky, “You can do whatever you want to Russia,” but also told him not to strike oil refineries because that was “a world problem.”
“And what does he do? He goes and hits the diesel fuel. He better damn well stop,” Trump said.
Trump criticized Zelensky a day after reaching an agreement with Vladimir Putin on supplying Russian diesel fuel to U.S. and global markets. The U.S. and Russian presidents spoke by phone the day before. The U.S. Treasury Department soon issued a temporary license allowing Russian diesel fuel to reach the global market in circumvention of U.S. sanctions, until April 7, 2027.
Ukraine criticized the diesel deal between Moscow and Washington. Zelensky said thatRussia’s decision to allow oil product sales “is an investment in the war.”
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Russia and the U.S. have agreed on a deal to supply Russian diesel fuel to the U.S. and global markets. President Donald Trump announced the agreement on the evening of October 9 after a phone call with Vladimir Putin. Trump called the talks “highly successful.” Putin confirmed that Russia is ready to supply oil and petroleum products to the U.S. and global markets.
The U.S. said it is easing sanctions on Russian diesel. The Treasury Department has already issued a temporary license allowing sales of Russian diesel on the global market through April 7, 2027, despite U.S. sanctions. Washington previously eased sanctions on Russian oil temporarily because of a market crisis caused by the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran.
Russia has also begun lifting restrictions on diesel exports, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said. Sanctions and domestic export bans restrict exports of Russian oil and petroleum products worldwide. A ban on diesel and marine fuel exports by producers, for example, remains in effect through the end of October. Russia imposed it amid Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries and a domestic fuel crisis caused by Ukrainian attacks over the summer.
Trump said the two sides agreed on the “immediate” delivery of more than 300,000 metric tons of Russian diesel. Russia will supply another 500,000 metric tons in November, followed by an additional million metric tons. Novak said Russia is ready to supply additional diesel to the U.S. market as early as October. Exports are also expected to rise in November and December as refineries resume operations after repairs.
Ukraine criticized the diesel deal between Moscow and Washington. President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on social media that any easing of sanctions on Russia without agreements on de-escalation shows “obvious weakness.” “Gifts to Putin will not bring peace or any benefit to the civilized world. Russia will ‘repay’ the diesel with further terror and perfidy. Allowing Russia to sell petroleum products is an investment in a war that must be ended, not prolonged. What is needed is real de-escalation with Russia on a reciprocal basis,” he said.
The deal comes as talks on ending the war resume. A Ukrainian delegation is reportedly meeting with U.S. negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Miami on October 9 and 10. Reuters reported that the national security advisers of the U.K., France, and Germany, along with representatives of NATO and the EU, were invited to the talks. Axios reported that the U.S. negotiators plan to present the Ukrainian delegation with “new ideas and proposals” and then discuss them with Russia. No details of the proposals were given. “I think our team is simply being used as a front. That’s certainly dishonest, and it’s certainly no way to treat a partner,” Zelensky told reporters after the U.S. announced the diesel deal.
Russian authorities asked the U.S. to lift sanctions as part of talks on an “energy truce,” sources told The Kyiv Independent on the eve of the diesel deal. Officials in Kyiv said Ukraine was ready to stop attacking Russian oil refineries if Russia agreed to stop striking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
Trump, who is under pressure over rising U.S. fuel prices ahead of the congressional midterm elections, has repeatedly demanded that Ukraine stop striking Russian oil facilities. He said the attacks were causing global fuel shortages and price increases.
Putin rejected the idea of an “energy truce” with Kyiv on October 2. Speaking at the Valdai forum, he said stopping the strikes alone would not solve the problem of high diesel prices in the U.S. and around the world unless sanctions on Russia were lifted.
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U.S. President Donald Trump said he had reached a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to supply Russian diesel fuel to U.S. and global markets. Trump said they reached the agreement during “highly successful” talks by phone.
Russia agreed to supply more than 300,000 metric tons of diesel fuel to U.S. and global markets as soon as possible, Trump said. It will supply another 500,000 metric tons in November and 1 million metric tons “immediately thereafter.”
“Based on the condition of their Diesel Refineries,” Moscow could also supply another 3 million metric tons of diesel “within a short period of time,” Trump said.
Trump’s announcement came as the U.S. Treasury Department issued a temporary license allowing Russian diesel fuel to be supplied to the global market until April 7, 2027.
“Thanks to our total control of the Strait of Hormuz, and this great announcement on Russian Energy, Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST!” Trump said.
In a response on social media, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the diesel deal “an investment in a war that must be ended, not prolonged”:
Peace never comes through weakness. Today, representatives of the U.S. Congress were in Kyiv – a bipartisan delegation – and I am grateful to them for visiting Ukraine at such a difficult time. They asked: what is needed to end the war? The answer must be strong. There must be…
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 9, 2026
Exports of Russian oil and petroleum products to countries around the world are restricted by sanctions and Russia’s own export bans. For example, a ban on producers exporting diesel fuel, marine fuel, and gas oil remains in effect until the end of October.
Sources told Interfax on October 6 that Russian authorities were considering partially lifting the ban on diesel exports for some producers that month.
Ukraine has also been striking Russian oil refineries. These attacks caused a fuel crisis in Russia during the summer of 2026. Donald Trump has repeatedly urged Zelensky to stop attacking Russian oil facilities. According to Trump, the strikes are causing a global fuel shortage and driving up prices.
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Several aircraft from Russia’s Rossiya Special Flight Detachment, which transports the country’s leaders and senior officials, circled over Moscow on the evening of October 9 because of the threat of a Ukrainian drone attack.
Five of the detachment’s aircraft were unable to land immediately. At least three were returning from Turkmenistan, where Russian President Vladimir Putin had attended a Commonwealth of Independent States summit, several Russian news outlets and Telegram channels reported (1, 2, 3). All three were Il-96s, the type used to transport the president, Agentstvo reported.
According to Flightradar24, two Il-96s with registration numbers RA-96020 and RA-96022 circled over Moscow and the surrounding region. They departed Turkmenbashi Airport at 2 p.m. and 2:15 p.m. and landed at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport at 6:06 p.m. and 6:21 p.m., respectively.
A third Il-96, with registration number RA-96025, departed Turkmenbashi at 3:52 p.m. and flew over Moscow even though it was scheduled to land at Vnukovo. It was eventually diverted to St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport and later departed for Moscow.
Restrictions were imposed at all Moscow airports around 3:40 p.m. and fully lifted by 6:40 p.m. According to estimates from Ostorozhno, Novosti, more than 200 flights were delayed and more than 100 canceled amid the restrictions.
It is unclear which aircraft Putin was aboard. At 1:52 p.m., TASS reported that the president had ended his visit to Turkmenistan and boarded one of the Rossiya detachment’s aircraft, which was preparing to depart Turkmenbashi. Agentstvo suggested that Putin may have been aboard RA-96025. He had flown to Turkmenistan on that aircraft on October 8.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had threatened to “close the skies” over Russia in early September. Putin called the statement “a signal of intent to commit state terrorism.” In response to Ukraine’s threats, Russia’s Transport Ministry said the country’s aviation services would prevent “significant disruptions” to civil aviation.
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Kramatorsk, October 8. A Russian strike hit two buses carrying passengers on regular routes. Thirty-three people were killed.
Ukrainian drones attacked Russia’s Kaluga region overnight into October 9, Governor Vladislav Shapsha said. He said Ukrainian forces struck infrastructure in Kaluga but gave no further details. Nine people were injured, five of whom were hospitalized.
Yandex later said its data center in Kaluga had come under drone attack. No employees were injured, but “several data center modules have been completely disabled.” The company warned that some Yandex services could experience disruptions.
This was the second attack on the Russian tech giant’s data centers in two days. Overnight into October 8, drones struck a data center in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region. A fire broke out, and the data center was shut down completely. Soon after the attack, users began reporting disruptions to Yandex services, media websites, and other services, including Avito, Ivi, Megafon, Russian Railways, and T-Bank.
Responding to the attacks, Yandex said its data centers were the company’s “iron heart” and that keeping them operational was “critical to services that have become part of people’s everyday lives.”
“We understand that for our users, clients, and partners, every outage disrupts plans and prevents them from doing things they normally do in their daily lives or at work. Yandex teams are doing everything they can, day and night, to keep services running and help those affected by the incident. This is our most important task right now, but unfortunately, it isn’t easy,” Yandex said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky briefly addressed the attack on Yandex on the evening of October 8: “You all know they [Russian forces] have struck our data centers and are still striking them. We responded. I can’t share all the details.”
Russia has regularly struck data centers in Ukraine in recent weeks. Since late September, Russian forces have damaged or destroyed data centers belonging to at least eight companies. Russia’s Defense Ministry has called these strikes a “forced digital detox.”
The peace process
Ukrainian representatives will meet with U.S. negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in the United States on October 9 and 10. The Ukrainian delegation has traveled to Miami, where the talks will take place. Its members include presidential chief of staff Kyrylo Budanov, Davyd Arakhamia, who leads the Servant of the People parliamentary faction, and Foreign Intelligence Service head Rustem Umerov. Reuters reported that Washington had invited national security advisers from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, as well as representatives of NATO and the EU.
According to Axios, Kushner and Witkoff plan to present the Ukrainian delegation with “new ideas and proposals” for ending the Russia–Ukraine war. No details were given. The two presented the proposals to President Donald Trump at a meeting on October 8.
An Axios source said Witkoff and Kushner could travel to Moscow in October for further talks with Vladimir Putin.
Shortly before the Miami talks, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said there were currently no prospects for a peaceful settlement of the Russia–Ukraine conflict. He said the war had reached a “strategic stalemate”: Russia continues to insist on full control of the Donbas, a condition Ukraine finds completely unacceptable.
Rubio said the situation could be resolved in only two ways: through a negotiated settlement or escalation by one or both sides.
In response, Zelensky said breaking the stalemate would require increasing economic pressure on Russia, allowing Ukraine to use Starlink for strikes on Russian territory, and refusing to reach agreements with Moscow on any future projects:
It would cost them nothing, absolutely nothing, to help Ukraine. And I’ve said frankly: Give us that. Help us defend our airspace and dominate it. Then Putin will come to the negotiating table. Why? Because he’ll lose everything. He’ll lose everything. Three months, two months — he’ll lose everything.
But instead, we’re waiting for the Chinese to develop their equivalent and hand it over to the Russians. So where’s the truth in that? Where’s the honesty? Where is any of it? What dead end? What dead end? This isn’t a dead end. It’s called unwillingness. It’s not a dead end.
In mid-September, Trump said Russia and Ukraine had agreed to stop striking each other’s energy infrastructure. In practice, however, that did not happen. Zelensky said Ukraine was ready to stop attacking Russian oil refineries if Russia agreed to stop striking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
The Kremlin called an energy ceasefire “a very good idea.” Sources told The Kyiv Independent that Russia had demanded U.S. sanctions relief during talks on a possible energy ceasefire. It is unclear which sanctions were involved.
The war in photographs: the aftermath of a Russian strike on Zaporizhzhia
On the morning of October 9, Russian forces struck Zaporizhzhia with aerial bombs. Mykhailo Semikin, head of the Zaporizhzhia regional military administration, said six aerial bombs had been dropped on the city. Homes and cars were damaged. According to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service, a 50-year-old man was killed and 14 people were injured.
A woman from Zaporizhzhia next to a home damaged in a Russian strikeA destroyed home in ZaporizhzhiaThe body of a man killed in the attack on ZaporizhzhiaZaporizhzhia residents near the site of a Russian strike
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Update: Prosecutors have overturned the decision to open a criminal investigation into Nikita Tulupov, an investigator in the Lerchek case, TASS reported.
Some of the jewelry seized during a search of blogger Valeria Chekalina’s home has gone missing, Interior Ministry spokeswoman Irina Volk said on Telegram. Authorities opened a criminal investigation into one of the investigators in the case against Chekalina, who is known as Lerchek.
The jewelry “was not entered into evidence in the criminal case and was stored improperly, resulting in its loss,” Volk said. Volk said a criminal investigation had been opened into the investigator for allegedly exceeding his authority. She did not name him.
Jewelry from Cartier, Graff, Van Cleef & Arpels, Rolex, Chopard, and other brands, worth a total of 14.4 million rubles, was seized during a search in the case against Chekalina and her former husband.
“Once the investigation was over, we asked for all the jewelry seized during the search to be returned, but the investigator refused, even though the jewelry is not physical evidence and no legal restrictions had been placed on it,” Chekalina’s lawyer, Viktor Dugin, told TASS.
Valeria Chekalina appeared on Forbes’ list of Russia’s highest-earning bloggers. In 2023, she and her husband, Artem Chekalin, were charged with tax evasion and money laundering. By March 2024, both criminal cases against the couple had been closed.
In October 2024, the Chekalins, who had divorced by then, came under a third criminal investigation, this time into illegally transferring funds out of Russia. In February 2026, Chekalina gave birth to her fourth child. In March, her partner, Luis Squicciarini, said she had been diagnosed with cancer. Shortly afterward, Chekalina was released from house arrest.
In July, Chekalina received a five-year suspended sentence and a fine of 765 million rubles for illegally transferring funds abroad. Her former husband was sentenced in April 2026 to seven years in a medium-security prison.
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A Ukrainian missile strike on Donetsk on August 26 killed 20 Russian military officers, Mediazona reported.
The outlet said this was the largest number of Russian army officers killed in a single incident since the war began.
The officers served at the headquarters of the Central Military District and the 41st Combined Arms Army. Mediazona confirmed their deaths by cross-checking personnel rosters against probate records and reviewing obituaries of high-ranking officers published over the past month.
Denis Pushilin, the head of the annexed Donetsk People’s Republic, said on August 26 that Ukrainian forces had struck the area around the Donetsk City shopping mall with Storm Shadow missiles. He said eight civilians had been wounded but gave no information about military casualties. An Izvestia correspondent at the scene reported in a post that 10 people had been killed, but the post was later deleted.
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Say Agency, the organizer of Kanye West’s canceled concert in St. Petersburg, has refunded 132,000 rubles to Voronezh resident Yevgeny Rasskazov, the first person in Russia to sue the company over the cancellation, his representative told TASS.
Rasskazov received the money on October 5. His representative said the refund covered the face value of four tickets. Rasskazov has yet to receive the additional 13,200 rubles he paid when buying them (likely a service fee).
His representative said Rasskazov had revised his claims against the concert organizer. He is asking the court to order the company to pay him 50% of the ticket price, a penalty for the delayed refund, and 30,000 rubles in compensation for emotional distress.
Rasskazov filed his lawsuit against Say Agency on September 9.
In mid-August, Say Agency said Kanye West would perform at Gazprom Arena in St. Petersburg in October. The organizers said they had sold more than 100,000 tickets. Gazprom Arena representatives later said there was no agreement to rent the stadium for West’s concerts, meaning the event would not take place. On September 17, listings for the Russian concerts disappeared from the rapper’s website. Say Agency did not officially announce the cancellation of the performances until September 30.
In early October, ticket buyers began receiving emails saying refunds would begin on October 12. According to Kommersant, St. Petersburg police have begun looking into possible fraud by Say Agency. They will send the materials they collect to the Interior Ministry’s headquarters in Moscow, where officials will decide whether there are grounds to open a criminal investigation.
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The Russian government has submitted a bill to the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, that would raise the maximum age for women in military service from 45 to 50. The bill appears in the State Duma’s database.
The bill would also raise the maximum age for women to remain in the reserves: to 55 for officers, up from 50, and to 50 for those with other ranks, up from 45.
The explanatory note says the bill is necessary to create “additional social guarantees for female service members.” Its authors say the current maximum age for military service does not always allow women to serve long enough to qualify for a pension and other benefits.
For example, a woman who signs a contract between ages 25 and 30 and serves in a location “where preferential pension service credit does not apply” may not receive subsidized housing or a pension after reaching the maximum age for military service.
The government also stressed that, amid the war with Ukraine, most of the personnel in medical units are women service members, “including those who have reached (or are reaching) the maximum age for military service.”
In July 2023, Vladimir Putin signed a law that raised the maximum age for remaining in the reserves by five years for certain citizens holding military ranks. The amendments set new age limits for soldiers, sailors, sergeants, petty officers, warrant officers, and midshipmen.
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Montenegro is expelling Mikhail Zvinchuk, founder of the Russian pro-war Telegram channel Rybar, from the country. News of his detention emerged on the morning of October 9.
Montenegrin authorities also issued expulsion orders for Zvinchuk’s wife and three of his employees, who were detained along with him.
Montenegrin law enforcement authorities said in a statement that they had “prevented potentially dangerous activity by these individuals in Montenegro.”
Zvinchuk said he had arrived in Montenegro the day before. He managed to enter the country despite being on the EU’s sanctions lists, which Montenegro usually mirrors. Zvinchuk himself suggested the reason was a border guard’s incompetence.
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A St. Petersburg court fined Nikolai Rybakov, chairman of Yabloko, 1,000 rubles on an administrative charge of petty hooliganism.
The court said that on September 20, Rybakov spoiled his ballots at a polling station, “acting deliberately and out of hooligan motives,” and then placed them in the ballot box.
The ballots bore “markings made in green marker,” the press service of the St. Petersburg courts said, without specifying what the markings said. Rybakov voted in front of journalists, checking boxes next to every candidate and writing “Yabloko. For Peace” and “Yabloko. For a Ceasefire Agreement” on the ballots.
“Rybakov’s actions disregarded the interests of society and other voters, ignored the rules of decency and propriety, demonstrated his disrespect for society, and resulted in damage to someone else’s property, thereby showing blatant disrespect for society and violating public order,” the court ruled.
Rybakov confirmed in court that he had invalidated his ballots, saying “more than 900,000 voters did the same.” According to him, doing so “showed no disrespect for society, of which he is a part,” but rather expressed the political position he has held “his whole life.”
Yabloko was the only party that campaigned in the September 18–20 elections with anti-war slogans. Russia’s Supreme Court overturned the party’s registration for the election to the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, in August. Afterward, Yabloko urged supporters to go to polling stations and spoil their ballots in protest.
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Russian authorities have asked the United States to lift sanctions as part of talks on an “energy ceasefire,” The Kyiv Independent reported, citing Ukrainian and American sources. Russian officials are also trying to link sanctions relief to a ceasefire in the Black Sea, according to the outlet’s sources.
Ukrainian officials familiar with the talks said they did not know exactly which sanctions Moscow wants lifted. A European diplomatic source said separately that the issue could involve returning control of frozen assets to Russia.
If Russia gains access to the funds, he stressed, “the likelihood that these will be used to escalate [the war] is almost guaranteed.” “No one really thinks they are genuinely seeking to adhere to a ceasefire,” the outlet’s source stressed.
Ukrainian authorities insist the energy ceasefire must be mutual and that Russia should receive no preferences in exchange for halting the strikes.
Reports that Moscow is seeking sanctions relief in exchange for halting strikes on Ukraine’s energy system emerged as Russian attacks intensified. The Kyiv Independent said Russian authorities may be trying to secure a stronger negotiating position in the talks.
U.S. President Donald Trump said September 14 that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to stop striking each other’s energy infrastructure. Mutual strikes continued anyway.
According to Axios, Trump’s special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are set to present the Ukrainian delegation with “new ideas and proposals” for ending the war during talks in the United States on October 9. By the end of the month, the outlet said, they plan to travel to Russia to discuss the “new ideas” with Russian leadership. The outlet did not specify what the proposals entail.
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A 16-year-old in Novokuznetsk died by suicide after spending four months working and studying at the Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan, where drones are assembled for the war with Ukraine, the outlet Echo reported. Echo said it has obtained an appeal from the teenager’s parents (it does not specify to whom the appeal was addressed) and a death certificate.
A source told Echo that the teenager — identified by the outlet only as T., without his full name — was interested in drones and had wanted to study at Alabuga. The source said the administration at Alabuga “pressed very hard, demanded that he fulfill the plan, and forced him to work,” and that he also faced bullying within his group, where “there was hazing, and older students beat younger ones.”
In their appeal, the parents said their son had lived under “a regime of harsh military discipline and a lack of time for sleep and food, in constant strain on his emotional and physical strength.” They said that after he returned, he “became withdrawn, stopped smiling and enjoying things, complained of constant headaches, lost his appetite, and slept poorly.”
The parents also wrote that the teenager may have been driven to suicide “in connection with his involvement with Alabuga, which is confirmed by his intercepted correspondence with unknown persons.” They gave no further details about the correspondence. The parents cited the conclusions of a psychiatrist, who said the teenager was in a deep depression “caused by prolonged stress at Alabuga amid the emotional instability of a child’s psyche.”
The source said that after the teenager’s death, his parents contacted law enforcement agencies, which “send back form responses” and have shown no interest in investigating.
The Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan has been assembling drones based on Iranian Shahed models since 2023. Those drones are then used to attack Ukrainian cities. The zone includes Alabuga Polytech college, which draws students into assembling drones.
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Since 2022, residents of Oleshky in Ukraine’s Kherson region have lived under occupation. In 2023, the city was flooded after the Kakhovka dam was blown up: the flooding destroyed dozens of residential blocks and all of its infrastructure. In the fall of 2026, Oleshky found itself cut off. There’s a humanitarian catastrophe there: the city has no electricity, food, or medicine. Every way out is mined and blocked by Russian troops. Meduza spoke to people who have miraculously managed to stay in touch with those who remain in Oleshky. Here’s what they told us.
‘The harvest was so plentiful there was nowhere to put it’
“Oh, it smells amazing here!”
Svitlana (not her real name), a former resident of Oleshky who fled the city in 2022 because of the war, smiles as she recalls her garden — and the compliments her friend Nina used to pay it. Before the full-scale war, Nina used to bring her homemade milk every Thursday.
“I had [about a third of an acre] of land, and I planted peony bushes all along the perimeter. The scent was intoxicating!” Svitlana says. “Nina asked why I didn’t take the flowers to market. But how could I sell something so beautiful?”
Svitlana’s yard brimmed with flowers until autumn, and hers wasn’t the only one. “It was as if the townspeople were competing over whose front garden was more lavish. Oleshky bloomed and smelled wonderful.”
Svitlana calls the land she lived on for three decades “rodiucha,” which translates from Ukrainian as “fertile”:
Stick a branch in the ground and it will sprout. Everyone had everything: tomatoes, cucumbers, orchards… I grew 14 varieties of grapes, three varieties each of apricots and peaches. There was so much of a harvest that there was nowhere to put it: I sold some and canned the rest. I shared preserves with people displaced from Donbas — I’d send volunteers whole crates of it.
On weekends, Svitlana liked to spend time along the Kinska River, a left tributary of the Dnipro. The Kinska had a beach and good fishing spots, and from its pier you could catch a pleasure boat or a passenger ferry to Kherson, about 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) away by water.
Russian cell service in Oleshky, which has been under occupation since the first days of Russia’s invasion, operates with severe disruptions. But because the city is close to Kherson, Ukrainian mobile networks can still be picked up at random spots around town. That is how Svitlana stays in touch with her neighbors Olha and Dmytro (not their real names), the people closest to her who remain in Oleshky.
These days, Svitlana hears little from her neighbors. She says the constant risk of a drone strike keeps them in the basement most of the time. In the spring, Olha wrote to her on Viber: “We just need to survive.”
‘Every day I hear explosions over the phone’
Mykyta (not his real name), another resident who also fled the city in 2022, keeps in touch with Oleshky through Ukrainian mobile networks. He calls his mother, Tamara (not her real name), every day, and to reach him, she has to go out into the yard, find a signal, and stay put wherever she finds it.
Sometimes the call cuts off mid-sentence. “My mother runs from drones. She hears a sound in the sky and rushes straight into the house, where the signal disappears,” Mykyta explains. “Every day I hear explosions over the phone.”
Mykyta spent six months living under occupation: he didn’t want to leave right away, thinking “it would all be over quickly.” “But then [representatives of the occupation authorities] came to search my place and beat my legs so badly that I couldn’t walk normally for two months. That’s when I realized nothing was going to end quickly, and I left.”
Tamara and her husband, Borys (not his real name), stayed in Oleshky. According to Mykyta, his father refused outright to leave the city — he didn’t want to abandon the household. “Dad used to say, ‘Let’s just sit tight, maybe things will get better.’ Nothing got better. He got seriously ill, and that’s when my mother said they were staying — Dad wouldn’t have survived the trip. She’s already buried him.”
After her husband’s death, Tamara kept putting off leaving because she didn’t want to abandon her two dogs. But both dogs died this year, Mykyta says:
My mother tried hard: she wouldn’t cook anything extra for herself, she’d give it to them instead. But she had to feed them whatever she could. A lot of people in Oleshky now eat purslane — it’s this fatty grass. My mother added it to the dogs’ food. They ate tomatoes, cucumbers, honey, pasta — whatever supplies were left. I think that’s what did them in.
The humanitarian crisis in Oleshky began in 2023. After the Kakhovka dam was blown up, the city was flooded by 90%, and its infrastructure was severely damaged. Since then, there has been no electricity or gas.
Flooding in Oleshky after the Kakhovka dam was blown up. June 10, 2023Ukrainian soldiers help civilians after the flooding in Oleshky. June 7, 2023
Only people with their own wells have drinking water. But pumping water from a well requires a pump, running the pump without electricity requires a generator, and the generator needs fuel. The last fuel delivery to the city coincided with the final food supplies, in late spring 2026.
Kseniia Arkhipova, a police officer in Oleshky before the invasion, tells Meduza this. In 2022, during the occupation, she began volunteering to help local residents, which angered the pro-Russian authorities. After they detained her, she left her hometown for Ukrainian-controlled territory.
Since getting out of Oleshky, Arkhipova has coordinated help for her fellow residents remotely, helping deliver food and medicine, taking part in organizing evacuations, and keeping a list of people who have died in the city during the war. By August 30, she had confirmed 136 deaths since the start of the invasion.
As far as the volunteer knows, no one has managed to bring food into Oleshky since spring 2026: vehicles that have tried have come under fire and been forced to turn back.
The Ukrainian news outlet Ukrainska Pravda has reported that by the end of summer it had become impossible to enter the city: Russian and Ukrainian drones clashed in the skies over Oleshky every day. The occupation administration itself accuses the Ukrainian military of blockading the city and claims that Ukrainian drones attack convoys carrying humanitarian aid.
Kseniia Arkhipova recalls:
In May and June, people in Oleshky still had supplies, then the harvest came in from their gardens: grapes, tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini. But the supplies ran out, and people started sounding the alarm — there’s no food. Mothers write to me: “Ksyusha, my child has nothing to eat, what do I do? He’s hungry all the time.” It’s like 1933 all over again, “wonderful Russian culture” in all its glory.
Kseniia is referring to the Holodomor, which killed nearly 4 million residents of the Ukrainian SSR. Ukraine’s official position, backed by 29 countries (Russia is not among them), holds that the Holodomor was a deliberate genocide of the Ukrainian people by the Soviet government.
Mykyta says that, just as in Soviet times, Ukrainians are dying of hunger because of Russia: “It doesn’t fit in my head that something like this could happen in this day and age. This is an actual Holodomor.”
In July, the occupation authorities in the Kherson region denied there was a humanitarian catastrophe. By August, however, they had acknowledged that Oleshky and nearby villages had no water or electricity, and that utility crews weren’t making repairs because of the shelling.
On September 21, Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, called the situation in the Russian-occupied city “critical.” “The Kyiv regime is doing everything it can to hinder deliveries [of food and medicine]. Russian troops continue working to resolve the situation,” he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also addressed the crisis in Oleshky. In one of his evening addresses in May, he said: “The situation specifically in this part of the occupied territory is extremely difficult, and it’s very hard to carry out evacuations. It’s important that international organizations — everyone able to help with this — are engaged and take decisive action.”
‘Oleshky is closed off on all sides’
Residents of Oleshky have very few ways to get food: Ukrainian authorities say the city is under a complete blockade.
Tetiana Hasanenko, who heads the Oleshky city military administration from Ukrainian-controlled territory, said in comments to Ukrainska Pravda that Russian troops have mined every route out of Oleshky:
People have two options: either die from starvation, or come under drone or artillery fire and be killed. There is no third option.
At the same time, Yevhen Voronetskyi, a serviceman with the 34th Independent Marine Brigade “Borysfen” of the Ukrainian armed forces, told Ukrainska Pravda that Ukrainian troops have mined some routes out of Oleshky to prevent Russian forces from bringing in weapons. Voronetskyi said Ukraine’s military keeps the main road out of the city clear so civilians can leave, even helping people make their way along it and sometimes guiding them with drones along a relatively safe route.
In 2023, Russian forces mined the fields around the city out of fear of a Ukrainian military landing on the left bank of the Dnipro. There is no confirmation that the Russian army has continued mining the main roads around Oleshky. Each side blames the other.
Petro Andryushchenko, a former adviser to the mayor of Mariupol who now heads the Center for Occupation Studies, said in an interview with the Ukrainian outlet NV that Russian forces are using the city’s residents as human shields: “This is a real humanitarian catastrophe, and one created entirely by the Russians as cover for military operations.”
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine reported on June 25 that “thousands of civilians trapped in frontline communities in southern Ukraine are facing a deepening humanitarian crisis.”
Oleshky became a front-line city in the fall of 2022, when the Russian army, under pressure from Ukrainian forces, retreated from the right bank of the Dnipro and left Kherson. Since then, the occupation authorities say, Ukrainian attacks have hindered their efforts to rebuild Oleshky — including after the 2023 flooding — and to deliver food and medicine to the city.
As FPV drones became more common on the battlefield, Oleshky, like Kherson on the opposite bank, grew increasingly dangerous. The front line runs right between the two cities, along the river, and it takes drones only a few minutes to cross the Dnipro and reach a target.
But drones aren’t the only threat in the city and its surrounding area. The area around the city has been mined so heavily that by early 2026, entering or leaving it had become very difficult. That, said Tetiana Hasanenko, who is trying to stay in touch with the city’s residents, is precisely what led to the sharp deterioration of the situation in Oleshky.
Vegetable gardens in Oleshky have turned into a deadly obstacle course. Neighbors told Mykyta that the plot around his house, which he abandoned in 2022, is “littered with mines,” including antitank mines and “petal” mines.
According to Mykyta, the areas around the city are unsafe too: “The riverbanks were mined, and after the flooding [from the destruction of the Kakhovka dam], the water scattered those mines who knows where.”
“Oleshky is closed off on all sides,” Kseniia Arkhipova sums up. “There are about 1,500 people caught in this trap.” Since the start of the Russian invasion, the city’s population has shrunk nearly 15-fold: according to figures from the Oleshky city military administration, 22,000 people lived in Oleshky before 2022.
Some residents risk their lives to walk to Radensk, a nearby village, in search of food. Like Oleshky, it’s under Russian control. The roughly 20-kilometer (12-mile) route is extremely dangerous: the road is mined, and the open terrain is exposed to drone fire.
Some still manage to get food, which is sold at an improvised market in Oleshky. Mykyta learned the prices there from his mother: “I’m in shock. A sack of potatoes costs 7,000 rubles! A can of sprats costs 1,000 rubles, compared to 60 in Radensk.”
Mykyta says a friend of his mother’s advised her to turn to “some religious people.” He doesn’t know who they are, but he’s heard from his mother that they have more food than many other residents. Through these people, his mother Tamara was able to get “a couple of kilograms of buckwheat, some pasta, canned meat, oil, flour — a little of everything.”
Mykyta has been trying to arrange food deliveries to his mother through charitable organizations in nearby cities, but so far without success.
The Ukrainian military sometimes sends humanitarian cargo into the blockaded city. Since March, Ukrainian forces have used drones capable of carrying up to 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of cargo, dropping boxes of canned meat, flour, crackers, oil, and grains directly onto Oleshky.
Boxes of humanitarian aid delivered by Ukrainian military drones
But this isn’t regular supply, and not every resident gets a package. “A ten-kilo package is enough for one family for a week. And then what?” Kseniia Arkhipova adds.
On September 27, the Ukrainian military dropped its largest shipment of food into Oleshky to date, delivering about four tons (4.4 tons) of food at roughly 100 pre-selected locations. Arkhipova afterward received many grateful messages from locals, and she shows Meduza one of them: “A huge, huge thank you to the guys. God bless them, a deep bow to them!”
Ukrainian military drones drop boxes of humanitarian aid over Oleshky. September 27, 2026
Overnight on October 4, the Ukrainian military carried out another operation delivering four tons (4.4 tons) of humanitarian aid to Oleshky by drone.
‘There were more than 200 people on the lists. But no evacuation ever happened.’
According to figures from Ukrainska Pravda, no evacuation of Oleshky has ever been officially organized in four years of occupation. In the spring, the occupation authorities promised for the first time to move Oleshky residents to safer towns. Hoping that would happen, Arkhipova, the volunteer, began coordinating people in a Telegram chat.
Svitlana, the Oleshky resident who left her blooming garden behind in 2022, followed Arkhipova’s messages in the chat. On March 5, she wrote to a neighbor: “Olechka, the question of evacuating Oleshky residents is being decided at the highest level. They’re compiling lists of people so they know exactly how many buses are needed.”
Kseniia recalls how “everyone hoped the Red Cross would come and evacuate everyone”:
The Russians started urging people: “Come to the hospital, sign up, leave your contact numbers. We need to know how many buses to send you. We need to count you — who’s bedridden, who isn’t.” There were more than 200 people on the lists. But no evacuation ever happened.
Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said, without specifying dates, that Kyiv had agreed on “clear mechanisms” for evacuation with Russia, backed by the International Red Cross. But Russia, he said, has stalled the process: “For a long time now, after the talks that were held, the Russian side has not confirmed its readiness to carry out a humanitarian mission to evacuate people.”
Kseniia Arkhipova said that by believing the rumors about the Red Cross and an organized evacuation, people missed their last real chance to leave: “Most of those 200 people are still in Oleshky. In the end, only 67 risked leaving on foot.”
Volunteers coordinate on-foot evacuations from Oleshky remotely, Kseniia says. They put together a plan based on information residents share with them whenever they manage to get in touch.
Residents of Oleshky during an evacuation in May 2026
The last “window of opportunity” for evacuating on foot opened on September 10 and lasted about two weeks, Arkhipova said. That was when Russian troops cleared mines from a stretch of one of the roads leading out of the city.
The first thing residents do is make their way to nearby Radensk (also occupied by Russia). After making the trip, some are “completely unable to move,” Kseniia continues:
They arrive dirty, emaciated, with nothing. Sometimes they weigh less than 50 kilograms (110 pounds), just skin and bones. No clothes, no shoes, no money — no home. Recently an 87-year-old woman was brought out on a cart. When she saw bread, she took out a handkerchief, wrapped a crust in it, pressed it to her chest and said, “I won’t give it up, this is my bread.”
In Radensk, refugees from Oleshky are housed with volunteers willing to take them in, and “they just rest for a few days,” Kseniia says. Some are put up in empty, nonresidential spaces, like stores. Then those who are able make their way to free Ukrainian territory — through Russia and Europe. About 30 Oleshky residents have left the occupation since the start of September.
The volunteer says that among those who left, everyone who initially didn’t want to evacuate “regrets, without exception, staying stuck for so long.” “I yell at them: ‘I told you to leave a year ago, two years ago, three years ago!’ And they answer: ‘Ksyusha, it’s hard to leave everything behind. You’re young — you just turned around and left. We can’t do that.’”
Among those Arkhipova has helped leave are also refugees who for a long time didn’t believe they were really in danger. She said they decided to evacuate only after someone close to them had been killed.
After being rescued from occupation, Oleshky residents can count on support that Ukraine provides to evacuees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). ”[But] while they fill out the paperwork and wait for that measly 2,000 hryvnias [about 40 euros or 3,800 rubles], what are they supposed to do in the meantime?” Kseniia says.
From time to time, she manages to persuade Ukrainian charitable foundations and Russian antiwar organizations to help refugees from Oleshky.
The “window of opportunity” for evacuation has now closed again, Arkhipova says.
‘These people are in a cage’
Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s ombudsman, is convinced that an evacuation of Oleshky’s residents could realistically be carried out in a single day.
Kseniia agrees:
All that’s needed is to clear the road of mines and send in, roughly speaking, four big buses [into the city]. People will come out on their own, and those who can’t move will be wheeled out on carts. Loading everyone up and driving them out — the whole operation would take three hours! Why isn’t this being done? Because Russia can’t be negotiated with.
In late September, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha spoke about the crisis in Oleshky in an address to the UN and the International Red Cross. At Ukraine’s request, the OSCE called on Russia to give international organizations access to Oleshky, supply residents with food and medicine, and allow them to leave the city safely.
Vladimir Saldo, the Kremlin-appointed governor of the Russian-occupied part of the Kherson region, gave an interview to the television channel Vesti on September 28. Asked whether a full evacuation of Oleshky was possible and necessary, he said:
Of course such a possibility exists. But let’s try to understand the residents who are there. Taking them and forcibly removing them right now would probably be wrong and unfair. Those who wanted to leave have already left. There are no restrictions for anyone there.
Saldo then added: “We need to do everything so that they [the local residents] can get everything they need to live there: fuel, food, medicine, communications.”
Two days after Saldo’s interview aired, Kseniia Arkhipova learned that several Oleshky residents had again tried to walk to Radensk for food. She posted a notice in the city chat warning that four people had been injured by landmines along a certain route that day and urging anyone heading to Radensk to avoid that stretch of road:
Regardless of Saldo’s statements, many Oleshky residents genuinely don’t want to, or can’t, get out. For instance, Mykyta’s mother isn’t willing to abandon her home, he says: “She says if she leaves, everything will be looted. ‘And who needs us there [outside our hometown] anyway?’”
Kseniia Arkhipova also described the fear that residents still in Oleshky feel toward looters.
From her conversations with residents, she learned that Russian troops rotated through Oleshky around mid-September: “The ones who came in now are polite — they might come ask for food, [saying] ‘you leave us alone, and we’ll leave you alone,’” Kseniia recounts from her acquaintances’ stories. “But before that there were ones who took everything. Or they’d kick people out of their homes and onto the street because they had solar panels, which meant they had electricity.”
Among those who can’t leave the city are the people Arkhipova calls the “undocumented.” These are Oleshky residents whose Ukrainian passports and other documents were lost in the flooding after the Kakhovka dam was destroyed. They didn’t want to get Russian passports.
Now, to be evacuated from Oleshky, these people need at least some kind of passport: both the occupation authorities and border guards on the way to Ukrainian-controlled territory demand to see documents. Getting a Russian passport without other documents is very difficult: applicants first have to confirm their identity with the occupation authorities.
These bureaucratic hurdles come with additional checks, and the fighting makes moving between offices simply dangerous.
“I have acquaintances who have been trying to restore their documents for three years now,” Arkhipova says. “They have witnesses, they’re going through the courts, they’ve already gone around to every [office]. And they still won’t give them a passport.”
Without documents, Kseniia reasons, it’s impossible to cross any major checkpoint: “Not Novoazovsk, not Chonhar, not Armiansk will let them through. These people are in a cage.”
Kseniia calls other residents who remain in Oleshky the “low-mobility”: bedridden patients and elderly people who can’t be evacuated without special transport and an escort.
On top of that, Kseniia says, there are people in the city who are simply afraid of the filtration procedure at Russian checkpoints. According to Human Rights Watch’s observations, even civilians leaving occupied territory for areas under Ukrainian control often have to go through it — not just those entering Russia.
‘The smell of death is everywhere’
“Those who left after me say Oleshky is simply unrecognizable. The city is gone. There are no stores left, no post office,” Mykyta tells Meduza. “I look at photos myself, and I don’t recognize a lot of the places.”
An airstrike near the Ametist machine-building plant in Oleshky. May 2026
Kseniia Arkhipova adds that in Oleshky, “people live in an isolated world”: “It’s worse than after the flooding [from the destruction of the Kakhovka dam]. There’s devastation and chaos in Oleshky. There’s no administration, no police. Cars don’t drive around — bicycles are the best you get.”
Arkhipova calls the hospital the “only intact island” in Oleshky. It used to give out food to those who were completely exhausted from malnutrition. But lately the facility “is operating on its last legs: there’s no medicine, no fuel — nothing.”
Mykyta also knows from his mother that there’s a medicine shortage in the city, and he recalls overhearing a Russian soldier say, back when he himself was still in Oleshky: “Why do you need medicine? Consider yourselves already dead.”
Still, Arkhipova says, the hospital can currently provide help: “There are doctors there who worked even before the war, even though they had chances to leave. They said, ‘I’m not going anywhere. What will people do without me?’ Recently an 11-year-old boy stepped on a ‘petal’ mine and lost his leg. If it weren’t for these surgeons, who would have performed the amputation? The child would have simply bled to death.”
The occupation authorities don’t allow burials for people killed in the fighting, the volunteer says. Novaya Gazeta reported that there is “no one to process” deaths in the city, but Arkhipova doubts that’s the real reason for the delay.
She says that people who die of natural causes are still being buried. “They [the occupation authorities] need a forensic medical examination so that a medical examiner will write: ‘These people were killed by the Ukrainian military,’” the volunteer explains. “And they need that so they can later pass that data on to the UN [and blame Ukraine]. That’s the scheme.”
The only way to bury those killed in the fighting, Kseniia says, is “quietly, in the garden.” But that’s dangerous: the occupation authorities consider these “spontaneous burials” illegal. “One girl buried a neighbor who was killed in a shelling attack in his own garden. They dragged her through the courts for two years afterward — had she killed him? They even came and dug up the body,” Arkhipova says. Meduza was unable to reach the Oleshky resident the volunteer describes.
Mykyta, whose father died under occupation, and Svitlana, whose husband, Ihor, also chose to stay in their hometown but then fell ill and died in the hospital, both confirm to Meduza that people who die of natural causes are allowed to be buried. Svitlana says that “by today’s standards” Ihor was buried “like a king.” She was able to send money to acquaintances in Oleshky, and they organized the ceremony.
“They reported everything to me: how they dug the grave, how a priest performed the burial service, how many wreaths they laid, what kind of cross they put up,” Svitlana recounts. “They buried my Ihor in not just one but two plastic bags, which was difficult because bags are in short supply there [at the hospital], and you have to sign for each one.”
Asked why her husband wasn’t buried in a coffin, Svitlana says: “There are no coffins left in Oleshky.” That’s what the acquaintance who organized the funeral told her. Svitlana believes it: there’s no way to bring new coffins into Oleshky, and getting wood from the forest is dangerous — it’s mined and exposed to drone fire.
Mykyta tells Meduza that his mother sometimes mentions acquaintances of hers who have been killed. “In March, a woman was killed — a strike hit a store while she was standing in line. Her husband hasn’t been able to retrieve the body since spring — they won’t give it to him,” Mykyta says, citing one example.
According to Kseniia Arkhipova, the morgue is “a small building not far from the hospital,” where bodies are “just stored.” “A body has been lying in a bag without refrigeration since January. What’s going to be left of it?” Arkhipova adds.
The Insider reported that the refrigerators in the morgue don’t work because there’s no fuel for the hospital generator. Tetiana Hasanenko, the head of the city military administration, said the morgue had effectively stopped functioning ever since the Kakhovka dam was destroyed. She said bodies have been stored in the hospital basement in recent months.
Sometimes, Meduza’s sources say, bodies are left lying right out in the street. “Russian [soldiers] lie on the roads for weeks, their own side doesn’t pick them up,” Mykyta says. “Dogs drag the bodies around. For my mother, these are just ordinary moments now — a dog tears off an arm or a leg and runs off.”
Kseniia Arkhipova also tells Meduza that stray dogs in Oleshky feed on human bodies. The Ukrainian news outlet Hromadske also reported that dogs dig up shallow graves in gardens and “drag off pieces of bodies,” while Ukrainska Pravda reported that bodies of not only Russian soldiers but also killed civilians lie in the city’s streets.
In the last days of September, Mykyta spoke with his mother again. Tamara told her son she had gone to see a doctor. “My mother says it’s hard to walk through the hospital,” Mykyta says. “The smell of death is everywhere.”
The Oleshky city military administration responded to Meduza’s request by referring to Tetiana Hasanenko’s previously published interviews. Meduza also sent a request to the occupation administration of the Kherson region but had not received a response at the time this story was published.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
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