‘Here, you can eat until you’re full’: Oleshky evacuees savour first proper meals in years

For many of Oleshky's famished evacuees, WFP is providing their first square meal in months or years.

In a quiet hospital corridor in Kyiv, staff and volunteers push carts carrying steaming pots of chicken soup, bread and buckwheat porridge to patients recently evacuated from Russian-occupied Oleshky, in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region.

For most people, a bowl of soup is unremarkable. But for evacuees like Olha, who spent the last four-and-a-half years trapped in a war zone, the World Food Programme ( WFP ) meals are a feast.

“Our neighbours had eaten all the pigeons in the area, every last one,” the 50-year-old recalls. “I simply couldn’t understand how there could be hunger in the 21st century.”

Olha is one of hundreds of people evacuated from Oleshky in late October under a brief ceasefire who are now receiving medical check-ups and treatment in Kyiv hospitals. WFP and its Ukrainian partner, Iskra Dobra, were the first humanitarian responders to provide hot meals the moment they arrived.

“This is the first proper meal they have had in years,” said Richard Ragan, WFP Country Director in Ukraine.

When the war erupted in 2022, Oleshky was occupied – sitting on the frontline – and eventually cut off from humanitarian assistance. Olha and her husband, Serhii, were searched, interrogated and threatened. “By noon at the latest, everyone was indoors,” Serhii says.

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