Food Supply Shortages Reported Among Ukrainian and Russian Soldiers on Front Lines

Photos and accounts describing emaciated Ukrainian soldiers circulated in late April, prompting public concern over conditions on the front line. The soldiers had reportedly gone up to 17 days without food deliveries and months without rotation. They were positioned on the left, eastern bank of the Oskil River in the southeastern Donetsk region after Russian bombs destroyed the bridges connecting them to the rest of their brigade.

Anastasia Silchuk, whose husband serves in the 14th Mechanised Brigade, posted on social media on April 22 that fighters were fainting because of starvation and drinking rainwater. "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 a request for an interview. A soldier named Oleksandr, recovering from a leg wound in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera he experienced extreme hunger earlier this year while in an isolated bunker on the treeless front lines of southeastern Ukraine.

"You dream of a hot meal, because what you get for weeks is chocolate bars, oatmeal and a bottle of water a day," he said. The 31-year-old withheld his last name in accordance with wartime protocol. Quantum leaps in the evolution of military drones operating 24 hours a day have extended the kill zone up to 25 kilometres from both sides of the front line.

This has made interconnected trenches or supply vehicles nearly obsolete. Positions on both sides have become isolated, turning the delivery of food, ammunition, medication and power generators into a matter of life or death. A commander of a drone unit named Ihor told Al Jazeera that the days when soldiers could leave a bunker to smoke are gone.

On the Russian side, soldiers are often ordered to move in small groups and are frequently targeted by drones. Small, explosives-laden suicide drones have also limited the use of tanks and armoured vehicles.

For at least a year, front-line logistics has been handled mostly with drones or robotised carts, according to Andriy Pronin, one of Ukraine’s drone warfare pioneers. He said the new supply system generally 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, told Al Jazeera that no more than 10 percent of the Ukrainian army receives drone-dropped food. A disrupted drone supply could lead to further cases of starvation. Days after the images circulated, brigade officers said in a statement that delivery of supplies including food is carried out by air and that Russian forces intercept and shoot down as many drones as possible.

The brigade’s commanding officer was fired. Officials 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 recalled that Russian soldiers once watched heavy Vampire drones with curiosity before they dropped their loads. In March 2025, a drone-dropped chocolate bar with instructions helped secure the surrender of a starving Russian soldier in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

A Tajik labour migrant named Mohammad, who was recruited to fight for Russia, told Al Jazeera in September 2025 that he received minimal supplies during nearly a month in an abandoned village in the eastern Luhansk region. He said he searched for raw macaroni and food scraps.

Mohammad reported his weight dropped from 76 kilogrammes before the war to 60 kilogrammes even after weeks of regular meals in detention. In October 2025, Ukrainian intelligence reported that hundreds or thousands of Russian soldiers on islands in the Dnipro River in the southern Kherson region faced serious problems with food and ammunition.

There have been unverified reports of cannibalism among starving Russian servicemen. In late April, The Times cited an intercepted conversation of two Russian officers discussing a soldier who killed and attempted to eat part of a fellow serviceman before being shot dead.