When a Ukrainian strike hit Russian-occupied Starobilsk on May 22, Moscow seized on the attack almost instantly, with Russian officials claiming that 21 students of a local vocational college were killed and dozens more injured and portraying the strike as a deliberate attack on civilians — which Ukraine denied.
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Russian occupation forces have deliberately manufactured a food shortage in occupied Rubizhne, cutting civilian food deliveries to the Luhansk Oblast city even as military supply convoys continue to flow, the head of the Luhansk Regional Military Administration reported on 8 June.
Shelves in the city's stores are emptying rapidly, Kharchenko said. Russian propaganda blames disrupted transport links, citing an alleged drone threat. Yet the occupiers have had no difficulty maintaining their own logistics routes to resupply military units stationed across the region, he noted.
"They need to make the next victim for Russian television out of local residents. They chose Rubizhne."—Luhansk governor Oleksii Kharchenko
The official accused Russia of weaponizing hunger for television cameras. He said the occupiers intend to film bare shelves and hungry residents, then broadcast the footage to Russian audiences as evidence of suffering they themselves engineered.
Before Russia's full-scale invasion, Rubizhne was home to more than 55,000 people. Russian forces seized the city in May 2022 after weeks of devastating urban combat during which they fired up to 1,500 shells per day, the BBC's Quentin Sommerville reported from the front lines. The city's current population remains unknown, but residents who stayed have endured four years of occupation without reliable utilities, communications, or public services.
In nearby Sievierodonetsk, conditions have deteriorated so far that residents now mow the grass in their own neighborhoods and clean communal areas themselves, Kharchenko added—an admission that Russia's occupation authorities provide no basic municipal services even in the cities they claim to have "liberated."
The manufactured food shortage in occupied Rubizhne fits a documented pattern of Russia using hunger as a weapon against Ukrainian civilians trapped behind the front lines.
In Oleshky, a frontline city in occupied Kherson Oblast, roughly 2,000 civilians have been cut off from food, medicine, and clean water for months. "If the situation doesn't improve, people will just die there from hunger. Because there's no way out, no food supplies coming in," an Oleshky resident who escaped occupation told the Kyiv Independent. Russian forces mined the access roads, destroyed the Kakhovka dam's water infrastructure, and deployed FPV drones that residents describe as conducting "human safari" attacks—hunting anyone who steps outside. People there hunt pigeons and wild ducks with fishing line, plant vegetables in shell craters, and bury their dead in wheelbarrows because no coffins or transport exist.
Ukraine's Foreign Ministry in May appealed to the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross over what it called a "severe humanitarian crisis" in Russian-occupied Kherson Oblast. Russia rejected calls for a humanitarian corridor.
In Nova Kakhovka, upstream from Oleshky, most coastal areas have been abandoned. The few residents who remain live in distant high-rise microdistricts with no functioning hospital and minimal Russian administrative presence, governed remotely from Henichesk, roughly 130 kilometers away.
The Rubizhne food shortage also coincides with Russia's broader restriction of civilian movement through occupied territories. On 6 June, occupation authorities shut down bus and private car traffic on main arteries, capping two weeks of land-corridor breakdowns that have further isolated occupied communities.
International human rights investigators have gathered evidence that Russia planned to use hunger as a weapon before the 2022 invasion. A report by Global Rights Compliance found that a Russian defense contractor purchased grain-transport trucks and bulk cargo ships in December 2021—two months before the invasion began. The evidence was submitted to the International Criminal Court for what could become the first prosecution of a head of state for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.
Global Rights Compliance has drawn a direct parallel to the Holodomor—the Soviet-engineered famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932–1933. Russia's current starvation tactics are being perpetrated, the organization noted, by "the same attacking state."
Under the Geneva Conventions, using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is a war crime. The Rome Statute of the ICC codified the offense in 1998. Yet in occupied Rubizhne, occupied Oleshky, and across the territories Russia claims to have annexed, the pattern continues: military convoys pass, civilian supply lines close, and shelves empty.
Ukraine's drone strikes on the highways that feed Russian forces in occupied southern and eastern Ukraine are disrupting Russian logistics and will likely bite deeper in the near future, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). The campaign is also rattling Russia's pro-war online community, where bloggers have begun turning their anger on the Kremlin's own military leadership. Russian forces are already rerouting and disguising convoys to keep supplies moving.
Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps said on 31 May that its drones had won "fire control" over five occupied cities. All five sit on or near the M-04 highway: Luhansk City, Starobilsk, Alchevsk, Bryanka, and Kadiivka. In plain terms, Ukrainian crews can now strike traffic on that road.
A Ukrainian drone operator argued the M-04 matters more to Russia than the better-known M-14. The M-14 links Rostov Oblast to occupied Crimea. The M-04 begins near Moscow and reaches Rostov-on-Don before carrying on to Russia's Black Sea coast and into the Caucasus. It feeds occupied Crimea, southern Ukraine, and Luhansk Oblast through the Russian towns of Millerovo and Kamensk-Shakhtinsky. It also supplies Donetsk Oblast through Novoshakhtinsk in Rostov Oblast.
The two highways connect, and Ukrainian forces are also hitting the H-20 road that joins them through Donetsk City. ISW assessed that the strikes will likely generate "even more profound cascading effects" across Russia's rear. The effort extends Ukraine's wider push to drive deep strikes further behind the front.
The strikes are already forcing changes on the ground. Leonid Pasechnik, the Russian-installed head of occupied Luhansk Oblast, issued a decree on 6 June. It bars regular bus and coach services on the section of the highway crossing occupied Luhansk.
Ukrainian Mariupol mayoral adviser Petro Andriushchenko reported on 7 June that Russian forces had changed their Mariupol–Berdiansk route. They now use local coastal roads instead of the M-14. ndriushchenko said the troops are passing army vehicles off as civilian, recoloring the tarpaulins over each cargo bed and spraying the trucks white. ISW assessed the detours will likely slow Russian supply runs as Ukraine keeps hunting vehicles.
Ukraine's strikes are landing in Russia's information space too. Russia's pro-war military bloggers are voicing discontent and panic over the campaign.
A pro-war blogger and former Storm-Z assault-unit instructor complained on 7 June that Ukraine is now striking factories and defense plants deep inside Russia while degrading Russian air-defense radars and systems. He blamed bureaucracy and state-corporate infighting for Moscow's failure to respond, and separately complained that Russia cannot read Ukraine's battlefield trends and underrates its capabilities. Other bloggers piled on: one claimed fuel shortages were stoking panic in occupied Crimea, while others faulted the Russian Defense Ministry and top general Valery Gerasimov for not striking Ukrainian logistics, especially the Dnipro River bridges.
ISW found the complaints are escalating, and that the strike campaigns are becoming "points of neuralgia" in Russia's ultranationalist crowd. It noted the discontent feeds on Russia's poor battlefield results, rising casualties, and economic strain. Even before this, Russia's war bloggers had turned on the Kremlin's commanders over inflated victory claims.
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