The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and a Ukrainian partner, Iskra Dobra, are serving hot meals in Kyiv hospitals to people evacuated from Russian-occupied Oleshky, in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region. According to UN News, the evacuees spent years in a war zone with little food.

Hundreds of people left Oleshky in late October under a brief ceasefire, UN News reported. They are now receiving medical check-ups and treatment in Kyiv hospitals. As of Nov. 2, the WFP was providing hot meals to more than 400 people who had left Oleshky, and the United States was funding the emergency food assistance.

UN News said the WFP and Iskra Dobra were the first humanitarian responders to offer hot meals when the evacuees arrived. Staff and volunteers push carts of chicken soup, bread and buckwheat porridge through a hospital corridor. “This is the first proper meal they have had in years,” said Richard Ragan, the WFP’s Country Director in Ukraine.

UN News reported that Oleshky was occupied when the war began in 2022, was on the front line at the time, and was eventually cut off from humanitarian aid. Evacuees said food grew scarce and prices soared, with a kilo of flour costing as much as $12. UN News said food deliveries ended altogether in May.

UN News reported that Olha, 50, and her husband, Serhii, were searched, interrogated and threatened. Their home was damaged by shelling and had no heating, the report said, so the family slept in three layers of clothes. Olha planted cucumbers, tomatoes and zucchini and tended them during brief lulls between attacks. She recalled that neighbors had eaten all the pigeons in the area.

Valentyna, 78, said she and elderly neighbors made soup from wild plants because there was no bread or flour. In Kyiv, she said, “Here, you can eat until you’re full!” According to UN News, people along the road to Kyiv stood holding signs and Ukrainian flags to welcome the evacuees.

UN News said the WFP has provided the equivalent of 4.1 billion meals to Ukraine’s most vulnerable people since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. It said the agency reaches 357,000 people a month in frontline communities with emergency food and cash assistance. About 200,000 students receive its daily school meals, the report said.

UN News said the evacuees’ future remains uncertain. They have homes they cannot return to, and years of fear will not simply disappear.