Displaced residents arrive draped in flags after journey to safety through occupied territory, Russia and Belarus
Antonia Langford
November 1, 2026
The Telegraph
Raya used the Ukrainian flag wrapped around her shoulders to wipe the tears from her eyes as she recalled the day a Russian soldier armed with an automatic rifle forced his way into her home in occupied Oleshky. He threatened her with the weapon and demanded moonshine, the 63-year-old pensioner said. “I was standing there, trembling all over, and he just stood there smiling and saying, ‘Why are you crying?’” It took her two days to recover from the shock after he left. When a neighbour came to visit, she was taken aback by Raya’s appearance and told her she looked “pale as clay”. “How else would I look?” she remembered replying. “He was threatening me with an automatic rifle.”
The displaced woman spoke to The Telegraph upon her return to Ukraine after a gruelling journey lasting several days that had taken her far from her home in the devastated front-line town, through Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine, to Anapa in southern Russia and onwards to Gomel in Belarus. From there, she and other evacuated residents from Oleshky swept across the border into Ukraine, waving, weeping and blowing kisses from the windows of a convoy of buses.
As the doors slid open, at a facility in the north of the country, they poured out, each person draped in a Ukrainian flag, chanting a refrain of “Slava Ukraini” (Glory to Ukraine) and “Heroyam slava” (Glory to the heroes) and embracing onlookers. “How glad I am to breathe the air of a free Ukraine!” one man exclaimed as he limped past on crutches, placing an enthusiastic kiss on both cheeks of the woman who greeted him. Yet beneath the elation lay unmistakable sorrow among the survivors from Oleshky.
Faces were gaunt and eyes deeply shadowed; many bore visible wounds, some had lost limbs, and others were ushered straight from the buses into waiting ambulances.
The Kherson-region town, which was occupied in February 2022, has been gripped by a severe humanitarian crisis for much of this year after it became isolated by fighting and drones, preventing food and medicine deliveries entirely after May.
Ukrainian officials estimated that around 2,000 residents remained in Oleshky before a localised ceasefire brokered by Melania Trump and the Pope provided a short window for them to leave earlier this week.
Svitlana Vasylivna, 90, had lived in Oleshky for 64 years before leaving this week. She told The Telegraph that she had scarcely dared venture beyond her front door during the occupation, even after the upper floor of her home was destroyed by a fire in 2022 and its ground floor flooded the following year.
Conditions became increasingly desperate in 2025, she said, but she survived through packages of food supplied by the local church and relied on her chickens to keep her supplied with fresh eggs.
Then the food deliveries stopped and Russian soldiers shelled her fence, leaving the chickens defenceless against the packs of roaming, starving stray dogs abandoned by their owners who had fled. By this year, there was “simply nothing” to eat. “All I had was a bit of grain and I was so sick of it that I couldn’t eat it any more. I just felt this emptiness inside, my heart hurt, especially since I only weigh 55 kilograms,” Svitlana said, gesturing towards her stomach with bony hands.
Even then she could hardly bring herself to leave her home, but realised that to remain would have meant certain death in a bitter, barren winter: “All my windows were shattered, everything inside had burned down and the whole place was wide open. The pipes had burst, there was no heating, I was freezing. I have no idea how I survived.”
Others in the town said they had survived on home-grown vegetables in allotments that were periodically shelled, and on edible weeds foraged from the wilderness. “It was basically a test of survival,” said 65-year-old Liuba. “Not everyone had the means to water their garden or plant things, so we really pulled together and shared what we had with one another. “Lately people were making soup using a type of edible wild green. It was difficult [to feed everyone] but we really helped one another, and kept waiting for something to change in our lives.”
As the situation deteriorated, some residents attempted the perilous journey to the nearby town of Radensk, some 12 miles to the south-east, in search of provisions. The route took them along a road riddled with landmines and patrolled by first-person-view killer drones.
Strewn with corpses and charred cars, the road was often lethal for those who braved it on foot, on bicycles or in vehicles.
Volodymyr Tsolaki, 66, a Ukrainian of Greek descent, said that he had attempted to travel to Radensk with three women but they had all been severely wounded when their vehicle hit a landmine. “I was the one who fared the best,” he said, pointing towards his injured leg. “I saved them, took them to the hospital. They couldn’t get out [of Oleshky] because they were in really bad shape, severely wounded.”
Another resident, 75-year-old Nina, said that one elderly woman had been forced to spend the night in the woods after attempting to traverse the road, owing to the danger posed by the kamikaze drones prowling overhead looking for people to hunt.
Back in the front-line town, no homes had been left undamaged, residents said. “I don’t have a single window left,” Raya said. “The doors are barely hanging on. All the windows are boarded up.”
In May, a shell hit her home, causing a concussion and injuring her left collarbone, she said. This, alongside her harrowing experience with the Russian soldier, contributed to her decision to leave.
Unlike other residents, she said she had few hopes that she would ever return. “When the fires start, we run around with a hose putting them out, at our places, at the neighbours’ places too,” she recollected. “But who’s going to put it out now? The houses will just burn down – there will be nothing left to go back to.”
Though many of those who had remained were elderly and had disabilities, a small number of children had also endured the years of occupation and months of starvation. When asked whether he was glad to have arrived back in Ukraine, 9-year-old Ivan answered with a shy “yes”. “He was so terrified, especially at night when Baba Yaga drones would fly overhead,” Ivan’s mother explained. “Drones, mortars – when they’re firing, things whistle and fly right over us.” “One drone struck our car in the courtyard and another hit the courtyard too – things were landing all around us, shrapnel flying everywhere,” she added. Some had waited years to see their relatives who had been trapped in occupied Oleshky. Liza Paliy, 19, and her sister Daria, 16, had not seen their father Mykhailo for the three years since they fled Oleshky, when he insisted on staying behind.
When asked what she would say to him upon his arrival, Liza said: “You might not understand this, but I’m going to be really angry with him. Because there was a lot of shouting, there were a lot of arguments, there was a lot of coaxing. “I’ll probably burst into tears at first, I’ll be so relieved, but I’ll still be a bit angry with him for putting us through hell in the meantime.”
Sure enough, as Mykhailo emerged from the bus, Liza and Daria screamed “Dad! Dad!” with hoarse voices as they embraced him alongside their mother Zhanna, shedding uncontrollable tears of joy.
At home, they said, they had prepared him a homemade meal of borshcht with salo, slabs of fatback. “He promised to bring me pickled tomatoes,” said Zhanna. “Combine Kherson pickled tomatoes and Kyiv lard, and you’ll have something delicious. It will be a great dinner.” Many of the residents said they still hoped it would be possible to return home after the war. “I believe I will live to see it,” Liudmyla Otselova, 70, told The Telegraph. “Oleshky has a history spanning nearly a thousand years. It was the site of the Cossack Oleshky Sich – a place for spirited people. “I hope I live to see Oleshky free again… Oleshky was Ukraine, and it remains Ukrainian.”
Antonia Langford is a Freelance Journalist, based in Kyiv. She writes for The Telegraph, The Guardian, and The Times, among others. She is also the Evening News Manager at The Kyiv Post. She covers Ukraine and Russia. Antonia was shortlisted for Best Early Career Journalist in the Freelance Journalist Awards 2025.