For families in Kherson, a food kit is not assistance. It is a reason to leave home, walk into uncertainty, and pray trees have leaves enough to conceal them. In the early hours, mothers, fathers, grandparents and children make their way toward distribution points, calculating routes, listening for drones, and staying close to shade.
Their destination is not a battlefield. It is a bag of food from us.
That fact should shake us. Food should sustain life, never be the price of risking it. Yet in Kherson, collecting a food kit is entering a kill zone.
Families stand beneath tree canopies because open streets feel too exposed. They take cover in shadows because the sunlit path may offer nowhere to hide. They are not seeking comfort. They are trying to survive long enough to bring dinner home each night.
This fear is not imagined. In May 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Russian armed forces’ drone attacks against civilians in Kherson province amounted to crimes against humanity of murder. The Commission found that civilians had begun waiting for cloudy days to go outside or seeking cover beneath trees where possible, fearful of drones equipped with live camera feeds and explosives.
Human Rights Watch similarly reported that residents in Kherson’s most affected areas were reducing trips outside and listening for drones as they tried to access food, health care and other essentials.
But numbers and legal findings, vital as they are, cannot fully capture the anxiety of a parent who must decide whether to make that journey. There is no safe way to explain to a child why a tree has become a shield. There is no dignified way to ask an older person to wait in a patch of shade because a drone may be watching the road. And there is no acceptable world in which a volunteer carrying food must consider whether a delivery route is also an ambush.
Our food kits matter precisely because they answer an urgent need. They give families something practical: meals, a measure of stability, and proof that they have not been abandoned. But aid alone cannot make a city safe. The people of Kherson need reliable, protected routes to food and medicine; responders need resources and equipment to reach communities safely; and families who decide they cannot remain need evacuation options that preserve their dignity.
Above all, the world must refuse to normalize this cruelty. Aerial technology does not erase the laws of war or the humanity of those below. Civilians are civilians, whether they are walking to work, tending a child, or collecting a bag of food. The international community must keep supporting Ukraine’s air defence, humanitarian services and efforts to hold perpetrators accountable.
Until then, our task is clear: keep the food moving, keep faith with these families, and tell the truth about what their survival demands. In Kherson, a tree should offer shade. It must not be the only protection between a family and death.
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