Starving on the front lines: Food supply in crisis as Ukraine fights Russia

Kyiv, Ukraine – Pleas and photos of four emaciated soldiers roiled Ukraine in late April.

The group had reportedly been starving on the front line after up to 17 days without food deliveries and months without rotation.

“Fighters faint because of starvation, they drink rainwater,” Anastasia Silchuk, whose husband serves in the 14th Mechanised Brigade, said on social media on April 22.

The fighters were holed up on the left, eastern bank of the Oskil River in the southeastern Donetsk region after Russian bombs destroyed the bridges connecting them to their brigade on the right bank.

“They weren’t listened to on the radio, or perhaps no one wanted to listen to them. 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.

Quantum leaps in the evolution of military drones hovering 24/7 above the kill zone that now extends up to 25km (15.5 miles) from both sides of the front line have made interconnected, walkable trenches or supply vehicles nearly obsolete.

The technological and tactical breakthroughs turn positions on the Ukrainian side into isolated, island-like spots, and the supply of food, ammunition, medication and even power generators becomes a new matter of life or death.

“Gone are the days when you could just come out of a bunker to have a smoke,” Ihor, who commands a drone unit in eastern Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.

Things on the Russian side are also dangerous, as soldiers are ordered to move in twos or threes to bypass Ukrainians and amass manpower and ammunition for minor breakthroughs.

But they are often hunted down by drones.

Small, inexpensive and explosives-laden suicide drones have made tanks and armoured vehicles look like dinosaurs that are about to go extinct.

The only vehicle that can escape a suicide drone is a four-wheel drive darting and zigzagging forward at 120km/h (75mph), but few risk driving one across rugged terrain covered with explosion craters and landmines.

“Once, we lost four pickups in one day,” Oleksandr said.

Air supply

Robotised carts on wheels with video cameras can deliver ammunition and food to front-line outposts and drive back wounded soldiers.

But they still need light reconnaissance drones to guide them. Heavier drones – mostly bombers that can release their cargo of several kilograms and fly away – are often the only lifeline.

For at least a year, front-line logistics has been mostly handled with drones or robotised carts, according to Andriy Pronin, one of Ukraine’s drone warfare pioneers.

For the most part, the new supply system works smoothly.

“All of my friends [on the front line] get everything on time, once a day, once every other day, everything according to the schedule,” Pronin told Al Jazeera.

Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University who monitors and analyses the ongoing war, doubts the scope of drone supplies.

“No more than 10 percent of the entire [Ukrainian] army” gets drone-dropped food, Mitrokhin told Al Jazeera.

A disrupted drone supply could lead to cases of starvation.

Days after the images of emaciated soldiers went viral, the brigade’s officers said in a statement that “delivery of everything, from a piece of bread to a disassembled generator … is carried out by air” and Russian forces “intercept, shoot down as many drones as possible”.

The brigade’s commanding officer was, however, fired.

The Defence Ministry ordered an investigation and said on April 28 that insufficient food supply to the brigade and two more military units nearby “must not become systemic”.

Oleksandr said he remembers a time when drones were a novelty to Russian soldiers.

“When we flew the heavy Vampire drones, they would look at them above them until they dropped their load,” Oleksandr said. “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. 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 starve

Soldiers 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. With scarce drone deliveries, he searched for raw macaroni and food scraps.

Mohammad said his weight before the war was 76kg, and even after several weeks of three meals a day at a Ukrainian detention centre for prisoners of war, he still weighed 60kg.

In October 2025, Ukrainian intelligence claimed that hundreds, if not thousands, of Russian soldiers were abandoned on the islands of the Dnipro River between Russia-occupied and Ukrainian-controlled parts of the southern Kherson region and had “serious problems” with food and ammunition supply.

There have been reported, unverified cases of cannibalism among starving Russian servicemen.

In late April, British daily The Times cited an intercepted conversation of two Russian officers talking about a soldier who had killed a fellow serviceman, “cut off a leg” and was about to eat it, but was shot dead by another serviceman.