Some burst into tears, while others looked dazed and struggled to grasp that they had escaped hell. Many seemed stunned to find themselves in Ukraine, surrounded by the calming atmosphere of a forest on the Belarusian border. They rushed for what they had missed the most: cigarettes and hot soup.

Leaving Oleshky during a six-day local ceasefire negotiated between Kyiv and Moscow, transported by bus to Russian-occupied Crimea and then by plane to Belarus, those who chose to come to Ukraine arrived on Saturday, October 31, in a state of utter exhaustion, caught between relief and shock, after years of war and occupation and months of famine, without water, electricity or medical aid.

The evacuees from Oleshky, a city in southern Ukraine located across the Dnipro River from Kherson, had lived under Russian occupation since Moscow's army seized the region on the first day of the war, February 24, 2022. After Ukrainian forces liberated Kherson on November 11, 2022, the Russian army retreated to the southern side of the Dnipro. Oleshky then became the frontline city on the Russian side, just as Kherson was on the Ukrainian side.

Then, over four years, as drone warfare escalated and the frontline was gradually abandoned, the Russian army slowly pulled its positions back from the Dnipro, maintaining control of the area but leaving Oleshky behind. The city effectively ended up on the frontline, in a no man's land, right in the middle of what military personnel now call the "Kill Zone," an area of death where nothing survives. The hell of living in a 'frontline city'