The expansion of the area is eliminating towns and villages, as thousands of people flee every month. June was the worst month for Ukrainians since April 2022, UN human rights watchdog he said this weekand at least 293 were killed and 1,990 injured. Casualties from short-range aircraft near the front reached their highest level of the entire war. Those fleeing frontline communities described UN staff “feeling hunted” by drones as they shopped for food or walked their dogs.
At a transit station near Sloviansk, where evacuees stopped to register and collect money and food, Skau met a 90-year-old woman and her daughter, dug out of the rubble of their home the day before. The mother, deaf and blind, had refused to leave for years. Nearby, a man showed a video on his phone to everyone who passed by. He was filming his neighbor’s burning house when an explosion hit his house, so he turned the camera around and continued filming.
“These are people who are determined to hold on and stay,” Skau said. That they are leaving, he said, shows how much worse things have become.
Plenty of food, no way in
Food is one thing Ukraine does not lack. Even with Russia owning about a fifth of its farmland, Ukraine remains one of the largest producers of agri-food, with exports from Africa, the Middle East and Asia via the Black Sea.
But near the front, the chain between the field and the table is broken. In some areas, there are no functioning shops, so WFP provides food. Elsewhere, shops are still open, but pensioners in particular can’t afford the prices, and often can’t withdraw their pensions because the bank machines no longer work – so the brokers hand out cash. Increasingly, they do both because they alone are not enough.
Much of what it produces is grown nearby. The agency buys from farmers near the frontline, and their harvest becomes school meals for children in classrooms, including some 20,000 who attend classes in the capital city of Kharkiv.
