Ukraine’s farms grew some 60 million metric tons of grain this year, enough to help feed hundreds of millions of people abroad. Yet along the country’s own front line, 700,000 Ukrainians depend for their next meal on U.N. convoys that barely stop moving.
The trucks roll through whole cities draped in anti-drone netting, mesh strung over roads and rooftops like the covers on fruit trees. They pause just long enough for families to hurry out and grab a box, then move on.
They cannot linger, because Russian drones now strike vehicles and people across a “killing zone” that reaches 50 kilometers from the front. That’s up from 10 to 15 kilometers not long ago, according to the World Food Programme’s acting chief Carl Skau, speaking to POLITICO in Brussels after a week visiting front-line operations from Kharkiv to Odesa. On one day he spent in the Donetsk region, authorities logged 1,400 drone incidents.
The widening zone is emptying towns and villages, as thousands of people flee every month. June was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since April 2022, the U.N. human rights monitors said this week, with at least 293 killed and 1,990 injured. Casualties from short-range drones near the front reached their highest level of the entire war. Those fleeing front-line communities described to U.N. staff “feeling hunted” by drones while shopping for food or walking their dogs.
At a transit center near Sloviansk, where evacuees stopped to register and collect cash and food, Skau met a 90-year-old woman and her daughter, dug out of the rubble of their house the day before. The mother, deaf and blind, had refused to leave for years. Nearby, a man showed a video on his phone to everyone who passed by. He had been filming his neighbor’s burning house when a blast hit his own, so he turned the camera and kept filming.
“These are people who have been determined to hold on and to stay,” Skau said. That they’re leaving, he said, shows how much worse things have become.
Plenty of food, no way in
Food is the one thing Ukraine does not lack. Even with Russia occupying about a fifth of its farmland, Ukraine remains one of the world’s largest agrifood producers, and its exports flow to Africa, the Middle East and Asia through the Black Sea.
But near the front, the chain between the field and table has snapped. In some areas, no shops function, so WFP delivers food. Elsewhere, shops are still open, but retirees especially cannot afford the prices, and often cannot withdraw their pensions because bank machines no longer work — so the agency hands out cash. Increasingly, it does both because alone neither is enough.
Much of what it hands out is grown close by. The agency buys from farmers near the front, and their harvests become school meals for children in bunker classrooms, including some 20,000 attending classes in Kharkiv’s metro.
Delivering it is the dangerous part. The WFP has recorded as many attacks and near-misses on its operations in the first months of this year as in all of 2025. Two weeks ago, a drone got through the netting and hit one of its vehicles. In May, a precision-guided missile hit WFP’s main warehouse in Dnipro, even though the building was marked as humanitarian, including on its roof.
Asked whether Russia is deliberately targeting aid operations, Skau wouldn’t speculate.
“We can just say that the number of incidents is dramatically increasing,” he said. “We’re determined to continue to deliver and to stay, but I need to be responsible for the security of our staff, and right now it’s getting increasingly dicey.”
Money is the other threat. Shrinking donor funding has cut the number of people WFP feeds in Ukraine from more than 1 million to 700,000, and it may drop to 600,000. “The 350,000 people that we’ve cut off, it’s not like they were well off,” Skau said. The agency says it needs $234 million through October to sustain the operations.
It is not a job the agency ever wanted here. Before 2022, WFP’s presence in Ukraine was as a customer, buying grain in bulk and shipping it through Black Sea ports for its operations abroad. The sooner it can be just a buyer again, Skau said, the better.
