A harsh scream rang out as a teenage girl recognized her father. She was one of hundreds of people who had escaped: years of Russian occupation, months of hunger under a deadly drone war, and then a truce backed by a first lady and the Pope and an odyssey back to her loved ones. A fleet of buses carried evacuees from the besieged Ukrainian city of Oleshky out of the war zone on Saturday, as passengers waved and wiped away tears as they entered the parking lot and finished their return journey. Banderas, the evacuees cautiously stepped off the buses, tired after a 24-hour journey, which took them from the front line and through Russia and Belarus before returning to Ukraine. Many were emaciated from having lived for months with little food, with dark circles around their eyes from lack of sleep. “We come from hell,” said Oleksandr Styopin, 75, lighting a cigarette. “It’s a death zone there.” Trapped near the front line, with Russian soldiers living among them, residents of Oleshky have been living under occupation for more than four years since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Their situation worsened this year, when Ukraine dramatically increased its drone attacks against Russian forces in the area, said Styopin, a retired electrical engineer. Roads were attacked and supplies ran out as fewer and fewer drivers dared to risk the journey. Some residents tried to drive to the nearby town of Radensk to buy supplies, but many died along the way when the drones attacked their vehicles, he said. The bodies of Russian soldiers were left lying on the road, he said, as no one would risk picking them up. Styopin would occasionally take his bike to a local store and stock up on all the food he could carry. He once passed a girl’s burned body next to his own bicycle, he said. “I think that was a mine,” he said. Some drones came close as if to look at it and then left it alone, he said. But they pursued the Russian soldiers relentlessly, he said. “They pinned them down so tightly that they couldn’t get out of the building,” he said of the Russian soldiers. A group of soldiers had moved into an apartment in his building, he said. Some of the evacuees described the hardships they endured with a lightness that bordered on humor as they recalled the destruction and loss. “There was no electricity or water. Then they bombed the house. Then the food ran out,” said Halyna Lohvynovska, 65. “We got used to everything,” her husband, Ivan Lohvynosky, said with a smile. His house was hit several times, he said. “When something fell on your head, you moved to another room. When the house was even more destroyed, you moved.” There were some young families and even small children among the evacuees. Vladyslav, 24, went out with his sister and mother. Thin and watchful, he declined to give his last name for security reasons, he said. The family had stayed in Oleshky because they feared that the Russian authorities would prevent them from leaving; He was of age to be drafted into the army in Ukraine. They survived by growing vegetables in their garden and raising some animals, he said. For some of their fellow evacuees, that was good luck. “The last two years were terrible. We had nothing to eat,” said Anatolii Honcharov, 53. His brother Valerii, 61, had not heard from him for three years because communications were so bad. Only families living near the river could pick up a Ukrainian cell phone signal. Things became so dangerous in recent months, Styopin said, that he didn’t dare leave his apartment. He was sitting listening to the radio, with a cigarette permanently between his teeth, he said. His wife, who left at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, joining their son in Queens, New York, called him many times urging him to leave. “If I try to leave, I will step on a landmine,” he told her. “For the last two months I was living with a drone over my head,” he added. “It’s more than fear,” he said, “it’s an internal fear that is always present inside you.” But Oleshky’s plight attracted international attention, helping to spur a rare localized truce in a war in which each side has pushed for every advantage. Pope Leo XIV, just three days after surgery for lung cancer, spoke with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and called for a ceasefire to evacuate the city, and then American first lady Melania Trump announced a local truce last Friday. When the ceasefire began on Tuesday, Russian soldiers showed up to demine the roads and clear the streets of the dead. “The Russians cleaned everything up,” Styopin said. “There was a destroyed armored personnel carrier with bodies inside,” he added. “There was a body in pieces, half here and half there. The Russians took them all away.” Many residents did not trust the news about a humanitarian convoy. Several said they had attempted to leave in convoys early in the war only to withdraw after the vehicles were attacked. But Styopin packed his things. Then, on Friday morning, as he was leaving his house, an explosion knocked him down. During the Russians’ demining, an explosion occurred and shrapnel tore through his suitcase, he said. He returned to get another box and then ran in heavy rain for more than a mile to the bus. “My heart was burning,” he said. “I thought he was going to drag me there so I could leave.” Vladyslav said he and his family were afraid to trust that they would actually escape. “These last four days, we didn’t think we would make it out,” he said. “We thought it was just another provocation: they would declare a ceasefire and then blow us up on the way,” he explained. “We were terrified, but we went anyway, because there might not be another chance.” Many of the evacuees and their families said they were surprised by the magnitude of the seriousness of the operation to get them to safety, and said it raised hopes for an end to the war. Standing in the parking lot, looking around, Vladyslav still looked unsure. “I still can’t understand my mood,” he said. “Happiness. Being under my own flag again, hearing my own language.”
