diff --git a/CHANGES b/CHANGES
index 2ae07a1ab..3d2bc693e 100644
--- a/CHANGES
+++ b/CHANGES
@@ -26,6 +26,7 @@ Bugs fixed
 * The warning type ``misc.highlighting_failure`` does not work
 * #3294: ``add_latex_package()`` make crashes non-LaTeX builders
 * The caption of table are rendered as invalid HTML (refs: #3287)
+* #3268: Sphinx crashes with requests package from Debian jessie
 
 
 Release 1.5.1 (released Dec 13, 2016)
diff --git a/sphinx/util/requests.py b/sphinx/util/requests.py
index 697e29087..8b7204c2f 100644
--- a/sphinx/util/requests.py
+++ b/sphinx/util/requests.py
@@ -17,7 +17,12 @@ import pkg_resources
 
 from six import string_types
 from six.moves.urllib.parse import urlsplit
-from requests.packages.urllib3.exceptions import SSLError, InsecureRequestWarning
+try:
+    from requests.packages.urllib3.exceptions import SSLError, InsecureRequestWarning
+except ImportError:
+    # python-requests package in Debian jessie does not provide ``requests.packages.urllib3``.
+    # So try to import the exceptions from urllib3 package.
+    from urllib3.exceptions import SSLError, InsecureRequestWarning
 
 # try to load requests[security]
 try: