Eating Last

In Oleshky, a town in the Kherson region occupied since the first day of the full-scale invasion, the winter of 2025–2026 answered a question most of Europe had not faced in generations: what happens when supplies stop arriving? The town has been under blockade since December 2025. Roughly 2,000 residents remain, including 47 children. By, spring, more than 300 residents had died from cold or hunger in unheated apartments, according to local officials and volunteers.  Flour, when it could be found at all, is sold by the glass rather than by weight. “I’ve exchanged it for an expensive watch,” our source claims. Of several attempts by volunteers to deliver food supplies, only one was successful — the rest of the vehicles struck mines or were attacked by Russian drones. People began hunting pheasants and pigeons because there was nothing left to eat. 

This story is not even the most extreme one. During the 85-day siege of Mariupol in the spring of 2022, Russian forces used starvation as a deliberate method of warfare — cutting the city off from water, electricity, and gas, and blocking or looting humanitarian convoys sent to relieve it. One mother says she was able to feed her three daughters only a spoonful of honey a day. She is not alone: in the streets, residents fought over scraps, while uncollected bodies lay around them. One mother in the besieged city said she could feed her three daughters only a spoonful of honey a day; officials described residents fighting over scraps as bodies went uncollected in the streets.

Mariupol was the most brutal expression of a pattern that has continued ever since in less extreme, but still deliberate, forms. From the earliest days of the occupation control over food has been used as a tool of control over the population.

The luxury of morning rituals 

Before the war, the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions helped feed the country, producing around a fifth of Ukraine’s wheat, barley and sunflower seed. Yet, in the occupied territories today, even everyday items have become unaffordable for many residents. In Donetsk, one of Ukraine’s wealthiest cities before 2014, (a kilogram of instant coffee cost about €38 by the end of 2025, compared with roughly €17 in government-controlled areas. 

“Coffee has quietly shifted from a breakfast ritual taken for granted to a luxury item many families can no longer afford,” says our contact in the Luhansk region. She is “lucky” – her son, Misha, managed to flee to Kyiv. “I am not sure I will ever hug him again. But at least I know has something to eat”.

Not all mothers can say the same. The population of occupied Donetsk and Luhansk has more than halved since 2012, and at least 60 percent of those who remained are women. Men who might have worked in the mines or in the fields once are gone – mobilised, displaced or in hiding.

Occupation erodes the economy step-by-step. Businesses close. Unemployment rises. Water structure fails and is not reliably repaired.

Meanwhile, the occupying administration works hard to maintain the appearance of “normal life”: repainted façades, festivals, concerts, grand museum openings and hastily rewritten narratives. Yet the daily challenges of finding food, obtaining medicine and making it through the week are left for residents to manage themselves and, in practice, fall largely on women. 

Barter, the return of an old surviving instinct, and the rise of kitchen gardens 

Where money is scarce, communities have rebuilt older forms of economic exchange. Eggs exchanged for medicine. A jar of preserves for a pair of shoes. An afternoon of childcare for a bag of porridge. Expired products will do. People remember this as a “forgotten practice from the distant 1990s’”.  

In some cases, this goes even further. Relatives and contacts outside the occupied territories coordinate to smuggle medicine, formula, or seed stock through routes that shift constantly to avoid checkpoints and inspections. The risk is real – confiscation, interrogation – but for many households the alternative is is to live without products that no local market may ever have in stock.

For many women who had never gardened before, kitchen gardens have now become a primary food source. They follow planting calendars used by their grandmothers, saving or exchanging seeds instead of buying them. By exchanging surplus produce, they diversify their food supply. It is precarious work. Shelling damages crops, water access is unreliable, and, in some areas, the occupying administration has restricted access to farmland under vague “security” justifications. 

“For many families, a functioning garden is now the difference between a stable diet and total dependence on a market they neither trust nor can afford. We would starve otherwise,” says Misha’s mother.

What no statistic will show: Rationing as a form of leadership

Within that squeeze — stretching too little food across too many mouths — the recurring pattern is clear: mothers eat last, and they endure this stoically.

“It is easier to stop expecting breakfast than to explain its absence to a child every morning”, explains Nadia, whose young children meant her family didn't leave “on time”. “Protein disappears first. Then the variety of supplies. What is left are staple foods that can be bought in bulk and made to last: grains, preserved vegetables, and whatever the kitchen garden produced that season. I've organised our meals around what our children need to function at school. As an adult, I can manage without,” she says. This is not passive deprivation — she is actively adapting to scarcity. It is a form of leadership that often goes unnoticed: every day, someone must decide who gets to eat what.

Taken together, these practices form a shadow economy of survival, built and sustained almost entirely by women. They operate quietly, defying a system that does not care whether its citizens have enough food to survive. This is not organised resistance. It is something simple, yet powerful: a mother deciding she can skip a meal, so her child does not have to, or ensuring there is enough food for a husband hiding from mobilisation. More than 1,600 days into the occupation, such decisions remain an essential part of everyday survival.