Al Jazeera reports: My husband shouted and begged, saying there was no food and water,” Silchuk wrote.She did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for an interview.Oleksandr, a soldier who has served recently, told Al Jazeera that he has felt the effects of extreme hunger while fighting for his homeland.While holed up in an isolated, scrupulously hidden bunker on the treeless, open front lines of southeastern Ukraine earlier this year, Oleksandr missed his family, home and the life he had before Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. But what he missed the most was real food.“You dream of a hot meal, because what you get for weeks is chocolate bars, oatmeal and a bottle of water a day,” the serviceman recovering from a leg wound in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.The gaunt, tattooed 31-year-old, who is getting used to a ceramic kneecap, withheld his last name and details of his service in accordance with wartime protocol.
Advertisement A disrupted drone supply could lead to cases of starvation. “And then some would fall, and some would flee. Or crawl away.”In March 2025, a bit of drone-dropped food smoothed a soldier’s surrender.The Third Stormtrooper Brigade spotted a starving Russian soldier who was hiding in the snow-swept forest in the northeastern Kharkiv region.
Background
Having witnessed the deaths of fellow servicemen, he signalled with signs to a Ukrainian reconnaissance drone that he would give himself up. He did so after receiving a chocolate bar with instructions on how to get to Ukrainian positions written on it.Left to starveSoldiers on the Russian side are often sent on high-risk missions with next to no drone-dropped food.“They gave me a small bottle of water, two or three very small chocolate bars,” Mohammad, a Tajik labour migrant duped into “volunteering” to fight against Ukraine, told Al Jazeera in September 2025.He said he spent almost a month in an abandoned village in the eastern Luhansk region.
Key facts
- Advertisement A disrupted drone supply could lead to cases of starvation.
- “And then some would fall, and some would flee.
- Having witnessed the deaths of fellow servicemen, he signalled with signs to a Ukrainian reconnaissance drone that he would give himself up.
Originally reported by Al Jazeera. This story has been edited and re-presented by BRIC Team.
