‘We Are Coming From Hell’: A Ukrainian City’s Evacuees Tell Survival Stories

‘We Are Coming From Hell’: A Ukrainian City’s Evacuees Tell Survival Stories - The New York Times

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!A group of people appear distressed, many crying and wrapped in yellow and blue fabric. Two people hug tightly in the foreground.

‘We Are Coming From Hell’: A Ukrainian City’s Evacuees Tell Survival Stories

Safely out of Oleshky after enduring years in the combat zone and a harrowing 24-hour journey, weary civilians reunited with family and friends.

*Ukrainians evacuated from the frontline town of Oleshky, Ukraine, on Saturday.*

‘We Are Coming From Hell’: A Ukrainian City’s Evacuees Tell Survival Stories

Safely out of Oleshky after enduring years in the combat zone and a harrowing 24-hour journey, weary civilians reunited with family and friends.

Ukrainians evacuated from the frontline town of Oleshky, Ukraine, on Saturday.Credit...

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By Carlotta Gall and Oleksandr Chubko

Photographs by David Guttenfelder

Reporting from northern Ukraine, near the border with Belarus

Oct. 31, 2026Updated 5:43 p.m. ET

A rasping scream rang out as a teenager recognized her father. He was one of the 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 their loved ones.

A fleet of buses brought the evacuees from the embattled Ukrainian city of Oleshky out of the war zone on Saturday, the passengers waving and wiping tears as they swung into the parking lot and ended their journey back.

Draped in Ukrainian flags, the evacuees stepped down gingerly from the buses, weary after a 24-hour journey, which took them from the front line and through Russia and Belarus before returning to Ukraine. Many were gaunt from living months with little food, dark rings round their eyes from lack of sleep.

“We are coming from hell,” said Oleksandr Styopin, 75, lighting a cigarette. “It’s a kill zone there.”

Trapped close to the front line, with Russian soldiers living among them, the residents of Oleshky have been living under occupation for more than four years since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Their predicament worsened this year, when Ukraine drastically increased its drone attacks on Russian forces in the area, said Mr. Styopin, a retired electrical engineer.

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