The thousand survivors of Oleshky trapped by the Russian occupation

Kyiv, from our correspondent. The tall Soviet-era blocks of flats lining the banks of the River Dnipro often offered a voyeuristic view from one bank to the other. With the war, the tallest blocks have also been the hardest hit, and along the southern border – where the Dnipro flows into the gulf that bears its name – they have now been razed to the ground. The view has been destroyed; those living on the free bank cannot see what is happening on the bank occupied by the Russians. The town of Oleshky used to look out over Antonivka; the two were linked by a bridge. Now Antonivka knows nothing of Oleshky; it neither sees nor hears what is happening on the other bank, which has been swallowed up by the occupation. Antonivka survived the Russian invasion; it knows what it means to be swallowed up – it experienced it for eight months – but it has no idea what it means to live through it for four and a half years. The two towns are located in the Kherson Oblast; today, all we know of Oleshky is what the Ukrainian army’s drones manage to see and what a few residents manage to get out.

Zarina Zabrisky is an American journalist living in Kherson, in the centre of the city that gives its name to the oblast; she lives in a block of flats where many flats have been destroyed. In recent days she has had no water in her home; she is adapting to life as dictated by the war, not passively but with anger. Kherson lies on the free side of the River Dnipro; the riverbank is now inaccessible to residents – only a few stretches remain reachable, but at the risk of being struck immediately by a Moscow drone. It has been some time since Zarina last reached the riverbank, yet it is as though she lives constantly with her eyes fixed on the other side of the river, in the part of Ukraine that has been swallowed up. With her very fair hair, she wears a bulletproof vest as she goes to visit the soldiers in the city centre. She is in Kherson to document the situation; from Kherson, she feels even closer to the other bank, which is very close indeed as the crow flies, yet it is inaccessible, cut off, lifeless. “There are now about a thousand people living in Oleshky; in 2021, the population was forty thousand. The worst thing is that of these thousand people, 70 per cent would like to leave,” the American journalist says passionately. No one can leave Oleshky, despite it being a place where everything is now in short supply, where around forty children remain and the majority of the population are elderly. It is a vulnerable place, inhabited by vulnerable people, among whom there are some who have attempted to flee, asking to be escorted as far as Skadovsk, another town in occupied Ukraine. Without money, you won’t get far; the journey is risky both for those asking to be taken and for those doing the taking, and no one will get involved for less than the equivalent of two thousand euros – a meagre life insurance sum that doesn’t take into account the money needed at the checkpoint along the way. Those who are now in Oleshky stay there, because that is what the Russians want. Because that is what the Russians need.

The town lies within the kill zone, the grey area between the two fronts, where drones are rampant. It is a war zone and, as long as there are Ukrainians along the road, the Kyiv army does not operate as it does elsewhere: the kill zone is less deadly when a Ukrainian civilian is involved, giving the Russians an advantage; they know that to prolong this situation, they must trap the inhabitants within the town. The Ukrainian army’s objective is to expand the kill zone; to do so, it must strike at Russian soldiers, pushing them ever further away from the River Dnipro. It uses drones to operate in the occupied territories, but if Moscow’s positions are hidden behind civilians, they go unhit. The thousand survivors of Oleshky act as a shield against the invasion, but amongst the deserted houses and the now-fallow fields, in this wretched realm of the elderly and forty children – with deaths ever increasing and no births – there are codes for staying in touch with the other side of the river. There are communication lines that work and connect the inhabitants of Oleshky to the soldiers in Kyiv. There are drones flying overhead that ‘know every house’. The teams of drone operators working in the liberated part of Kherson know who lives where, what clothes they wear, at what time they leave the house – if they leave at all. The Russians sometimes dress as civilians, and as Oleshky is a village of elderly people, mainly elderly women, they put on their clothes; the drone watches, recognises, targets and eliminates. The residents are remotely instructed on these procedures; they know not to change the colour of their jacket when leaving their flat, and they know not to set foot in abandoned houses, because when the interceptor drones detect movement inside, they pinpoint the coordinates, transmit the data, and the building is destroyed. Street by street, Oleshky shrinks; behind it lies a dense area of evergreen vegetation, where the Russians have built fortifications, but there are no inhabitants to guarantee their immunity.

There used to be a hospital in Oleshky, which, according to military sources, is no longer operational. “The nearest one is in Skadovsk, and Skadovsk is difficult to reach,” says Zarina Zabrisky, who has also spoken at the United Nations about the humanitarian crisis in the occupied territories – the UN does not set foot in the areas controlled by Moscow. There are dead bodies in Oleshky, but they are not being buried. The mortuary is a large room with no sanitary standards.

In the small town whose inhabitants Russia refuses to let go, electricity is beginning to run out, and Crimea’s isolation is making everything much more complicated for the Russian army. The soldiers are not receiving food; they are taking whatever is available in Oleshky, receiving fewer supplies, and are often unable to recharge their drones’ batteries. However, withdrawing from Oleshky is not an option; in some of the areas controlled by Moscow – those where fighting is constant – the occupation only functions when Ukrainians are present. If the area is empty, it is easy to lose it under the air cover provided by Kyiv’s forces.