The occupation of Olechky by Russian forces has left the city in a state of starvation, imprisonment, and erasure. The city's fate raises questions about the impact of this system on the living, the dead, and their memory, as well as the impunity that allows such actions to occur. This article, titled La ville prise en otage. Olechky l'insoumise, c'est l'Ukraine!, was published by desk russie. The tragic situation in the occupied city of Olechky, where inhabitants are starving, abandoned, and prevented from leaving by the Russian army, prompts reflection on the nature of the Russian occupation and the question of evil. This is also an opportunity to recall the sponsorship campaign carried out by L'Ukraine, their freedom and ours, to support Ukrainian civilians suffering in Russian prisons. Nine kilometers separate Kherson from Olechky, across the Dnieper River. A bridge once connected them, but it is now closed. Kherson is free, but it is under attack by Russian drones. Olechky has been occupied since the early days of the invasion in February 2022. Since spring 2026, the situation in Olechky has been described as escaping the ordinary register of war: a city of 24,000 inhabitants has been reduced to about 2,000 people, with a humanitarian crisis gripping the city as food deliveries stop and safe evacuation becomes nearly impossible. The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, cited by Kyïv Independent, states the pre-war population was 24,000 and the estimated population in spring 2026 is about 2,000. Olechky is not like other besieged cities that either hold or fall. It is a city already taken, which its conqueror is besieging from within. The city carries in its name the memory of the Zaporozhian Cossacks who, rather than submit to Peter the Great, established their Sitch under the protection of the Khan of Crimea from 1711 to 1728. A Sitch of exile, without walls or cannons, but free. A Sitch established in 1711 with the permission of the Khan of Crimea, abandoned in 1728. On 8 March 2022, the thirteenth day of the invasion, the inhabitants, as insubordinate as their ancestors, marched alongside their elected officials shouting "Olechky, it's Ukraine!" Many paid for it with mistreatment; no elected official served the occupier. On 6 June 2023, the Russians destroyed the Kakhovka dam. The dam had been under Russian control since February 2022, and Volodymyr Zelensky had warned as early as October 2022 that the Russian forces had mined it. The Norwegian seismic institute NORSAR recorded on 6 June 2023 at 2:54 a signal of magnitude 1 to 2 characteristic of an explosion; American infrared sensors detected a thermal signature at the same time. The investigation by the New York Times (17 June 2023), conducted with engineers and experts in explosives, concluded that a charge was set off in the gallery passing through the concrete foundations, from the inside of the structure, and that "the evidence clearly indicates that the dam was destroyed by an explosion triggered by the side that controlled it: Russia." The General Prosecutor's Office of Ukraine is investigating the facts under the charge of ecocide and war crime. The hunger as a method. At the Kremlin, it's an old acquaintance. The roads leaving the city are mined. The last store closed in January; the last food delivery dates back to 26 May. On 25 June, the United Nations Mission for Human Rights judged the situation desperate and counted, since the beginning of the year, twenty-nine civilians killed and fifty-four injured in Olechky and Hola Prystan, its neighbor, most by drones. In the summer, the gardens nourished what was left of the city. One makes soup with amaranth and purslane; some have come to eat the dogs. On the fences, residents have hung signs, "No food here," "Here live elderly people," aimed at the Russian soldiers, who are also hungry, who help themselves from the inhabitants. A kilo of salt is worth a thousand rubles, and a thousand rubles are worth nothing, since no one sells: one trades. When the Ukrainian army drops by drones four tons of food, the Russian soldiers confiscate the packages, and those who picked them up are thrown into cellars and beaten: receiving bread from Ukraine is to collaborate with it. The hospital, last refuge. Without electricity or medicines, one comes to sleep there because they don't shoot there, and to eat warm when the generator is running; in its basements, a hundred bodies that the occupier forbids to bury are waiting, while some bury their relatives or neighbors secretly in the backyards. Families disappear without a trace. At the end of September, the Russians discovered the path by which a dozen people were fleeing every day on foot, twenty-five kilometers across the fields; they mined it. In addition to four years, not a single humanitarian corridor. The Ukrainian mediator Dmytro Loubinets has drawn up a list of three hundred and fifty-eight people to be evacuated in priority, he has obtained the support of the ICRC and a truce on the Ukrainian side; Russia has never confirmed. On 28 September, Volodymyr Saldo, the governor installed by Moscow for the region, stated that no evacuation was planned, and that he would not give the number of inhabitants: it would be, he said, an information "non objective." In 1947, French readers discover a closed city. In The Plague, Camus tells of Oran, whose doors are closed, families separated by a decree, the journalist Rambert who searches for a smuggler to join the one he loves, the prefecture and its bulletins, the dead counted by week, then by day, then that one no longer knows how to count. Camus had written to Roland Barthes: his novel was the European resistance to Nazism. The investigation published on 29 September by the Ukrainian media Slidstvo.Info identifies two units within and around the city: the 126th Coastal Defense Brigade of the Black Sea Fleet, and the 331st Airborne Regiment of the Guard, from Kostroma, commanded since August 2025 by Colonel Oleg Morozov, call sign "Kholod," the cold. With Camus, the plague had no name; here, it has a radio call sign. The law of war obliges the occupying power to feed and care for the population; starving civilians is a war crime, and these crimes are imprescriptible. At the United Nations General Assembly, on 23 September, Andrii Sybiha, the Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs, recalled the Holodomor. The National Museum of the Holodomor said simply: the deliberate deprivation of food was one of the mechanisms of the genocide of 1932-1933. The past has here a face: from 1928 to 2016, the city bore the name of Alexandre Tsiouroupa, who was born there, the People's Commissar for Supply of Lenin, the man of the armed detachments who, from 1918, left the cities to seize grain from the peasants. It took nine years of efforts for the inhabitants to stop the city from being named after a person who caused famine. In 2023, the occupiers have returned the city the name of the commissar. No one confuses the scales. But the method is recognizable: a closed territory, food withdrawn, the number of deaths kept secret, and a power that holds the key and says nothing about it. On 10 June 1942, in retaliation for the attack against Heydrich, the Nazis executed the men of Lidice, in Czechoslovakia, deported the women to Ravensbrück, gassed most of the children, razed the village and erased its name from the maps: Lidice had to die. Three months later, on 6 September, the miners of Staffordshire, around a doctor from Stoke-on-Trent, Barnett Stross, launched "Lidice Shall Live" and took from their wages what it took to rebuild the village; towns in Mexico, Brazil, Panama, Illinois took its name. We do not compare a massacre of a day to a siege of six months; rather, let us compare two wills to erasure, and retain the answer: to erasure, cities all over the world have responded with its name. Banal by its men, radical by its effects. In Olechky, the evil seems banal: a policeman who copies records, a soldier who confiscates a package when others close a road, a governor who refuses a number; whether they hate or not, it is enough for them to apply. But it is also radical in the sense that Arendt gave to this word in 1951: an evil that makes men superfluous, and which achieves this by degrees. We first destroy the legal person: no Russian passport, no exit, no recourse; then the moral person: receiving bread becomes a fault, burying one's dead an infraction; then the individual himself: the uncounted dead, the bodies not returned, the name erased. Between Lidice and Olechky, the nature of evil does not change; its visibility regime, yes. Nazism exhibited: Lidice was filmed and announced on the radio the same day, because terror was to serve as an example. The Soviet power denied, and the Russian power denies: the Holodomor was censored and denied even in the columns of the New York Times; Olechky is a crime without numbers, with bodies kept in the basement, whose images of happy inhabitants are already being prepared, says Kyïv. One wanted that people know to tremble; the other wants that people ignore to doubt. Oleksandr Prokoudine, head of the Kherson regional administration, says that Russia is holding the two thousand inhabitants of Olechky hostage. The occupier keeps these civilians because their presence protects the cannons and mortars that he has installed in their quarters; he refuses to let them go as he refuses to feed them. Olechky is the metastasized form of a practice that runs through all the territories occupied by Russia: more than sixteen thousand Ukrainian civilians kidnapped, kept secret, used as currency, a figure presented in August before the Security Council. If the taking of hostages is the mode of government of the Russian occupation and the mark of its terror, Olechky is the place where evil, often hidden, becomes visible to the naked eye. This is why the response of the miners of Stoke-on-Trent is valid today. A civic campaign, "Together, Save the Ukrainian Civil Hostages!", proposes to the cities of France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Luxembourg to do what the cities did in 1942: take charge of the names of women and men. A municipal council that sponsors a civil hostage names it in session, displays its face on its facade, writes to Moscow to ask for news; it gives back to an erased person their public existence. Olechky is the name of a city; each civil hostage will have their own. Louviers, Amboise and Lyon were the first; others are preparing.