Married couple who had no bread for a year in Oleshky hug their 2-year-old grandson after rescue
Nina and Anatolii, a married couple from Oleshky in Kherson Oblast, have finally hugged their two-year-old grandson for the first time after leaving the occupied city. Living under occupation, they endured shortages of water, food and medicine, compounded by exorbitant food prices.
Source: Radio Liberty's Ukrainian Service
Details: Nina and Anatolii said no bread had been sold in Oleshky for over a year.
The city is suffering from a humanitarian catastrophe. Only a few products grown by locals were available at the market, at prices that ran into four figures. Sellers were charging UAH 1,000 (about US$22) per kilo for cucumbers or tomatoes, and UAH 2,000 (US$44) for a kilo of carrots.
"I'd buy a small carrot, cut off a tiny bit – and into the soup it went, just a couple of little cubes and a couple of strips," Nina says, recalling how carefully they had to ration their vegetables.
Food was so scarce that Nina and Anatolii dried goosefoot and used a coffee grinder to grind their remaining grain into flour for pancakes.
Quote from Nina: "I'd say [to my husband], 'Call me stingy if you like, but you get two pancakes, and I get two. That's breakfast. The rest are for lunch and dinner.'"
Details: On 14 October, Nina and Anatolii finally escaped Oleshky, travelling through occupied Skadovsk and Belarus. After crossing into Ukraine, they reunited with their family and met their two-year-old grandson for the first time.
Quote from Nina: "For 25 years I gave my love to other people's children, yet I'd never held my own grandson in my arms. And he said to me: 'Nana, today we're going to have a festive dinner.' [...]
I pray to God for our people who stayed in Oleshky. And I cry, I just cry."
Background: The Office of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Human Rights Commissioner previously reported that some Oleshky evacuees had largely survived by growing courgettes and had experienced being hunted by a Russian drone.
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