‘I don’t know what to do’

Flooding from the Kakhovka dam collapse displaced thousands of Ukrainians. Many are still missing.

On the night of June 6, the dam at Ukraine’s Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant exploded. (The evidence suggests Russian forces blew it up from the inside, according to The New York Times.) The disaster endangered at least 40,000 people and flooded 45 settlements, 14 of which are located on the Dnipro River’s Russian-controlled east bank. Rescue workers from Russia’s Emergency Ministry didn’t arrive until June 7, a day after the dam burst, while Russian occupation authorities have barred volunteers from entering some areas and have forced boats carrying humanitarian aid to turn back. Some people with relatives living in the affected areas have been unable to find their missing loved ones even two weeks after the explosion. The Russian outlet Cherta Media asked some of these people to share their stories. Meduza is publishing abridged excerpts from the interviews.

This article is an adaptation of a story that was published on June 20.

‘They have no food, and probably no water’

Viktoria: My grandmother called me in the evening [of the day the dam broke], at about 7:00 p.m., and said, “It’s over — there’s water in our building.” She started panicking and headed to my godmother’s. But because there was so much water there, she didn’t make it, she turned back home after getting halfway there. Grandmother Lena [her sister] said, “Let’s go to the dacha, we’ll get out of here and wait there.” I heard them talking about it over the phone. And they ended up going to the dacha. They knew that the neighbors had left, so they went into their building because there was nowhere else to go.

At first it was fine, there was no water. Then they called me and said, “Our building flooded and the water’s already waist-deep on the first floor.” This was at 7:00 a.m. Then, at 8:00 a.m., she said, “Viktoria, the water’s already neck-high. We still have two days’ worth of food, and then we’ll see. My phone battery is running low.” [They managed to get to the second floor, and] I didn’t hear from them after that, because the phone turned off, and I couldn’t even get an address.

I’m certain nobody’s going to go to that area. I don’t know what to do. There’s nobody there; only dachas. I have a godmother who’s in the same situation; she’s on dry land, but she doesn’t have a boat, and she’s not going to swim, she doesn’t know how to. There’s nobody we can send out there.

Before the explosion of the Kakhovka dam, those orcs would go house to house, searching the dachas, confiscating people’s boats, boots, and air mattresses. They came to my grandmother, too, and asked her, “Who’s the fisherman here?” And searched her house. She didn’t have anything; my grandfather died and didn’t leave anything but fishing rods behind. When they blew up the Kakhovka dam, it was several days before any help arrived. There were corpses floating around, both in Tsiurupynsk (Editor’s note: Tsiurupynsk is the old name of the town of Oleshky] and in Hola Prystan, and people were climbing onto the old roofs, sitting there with no water and no food; people died of heat. But who cares about old people?

I don’t know the exact address and I don’t know who I should call or write to. I can’t get in touch with the Emergency Ministry because their numbers are Russian [Editor’s note: On March 3, 2022, Ukraine’s State Special Communications Service reported that Ukrainian mobile service customers would no longer be able to call Russian numbers. The measure is intended to prevent Russian occupying forces from using Ukrainian numbers to send information to Russia and Belarus.)

My grandma brought her pills with her, but the most important thing is water and food. The stores aren’t working. Everything in their house is wet. How are they supposed to live?

‘I’ll relocate to the attic’

Lyudmila: I was able to reach [my mother] on the 5th, but she disappeared again on the 6th. We haven’t been able to contact her since then.

She was in her house; people came to her on the first day, other locals, and suggested she leave, but for some reason she didn’t want to. They told me [later], “We were at [your] mother’s, she refused, she said, ‘I’ll relocate to the attic.’” It’s near Oleshky, which flooded, and we live in Hola Prystan, which is also on the riverbank. They sent me a video: it was ankle-deep water, but it was running down the road like a river. The water was rising very quickly; I couldn’t believe it was rising so much. It was her overconfidence — “Oh, it’ll rise another meter, it’ll rise however much.” That overconfidence was what did her in, I think. She’s just a militant kind of person, and her age makes it difficult to get up and go, to change something in her life. She’s 73. She thought it would last a day or two and that would be it. She was settled there; she felt calm, she didn’t owe anyone anything, and she was in control of her life there.

She raised chickens, grew strawberries, and other stuff like that. And she’d say, “Lyudmila, don’t worry, everything’s fine with me, I have plenty of food and everything.” Mom was still well-stocked; she would have remained there, if not for this flood, and she would have waited for us to get to her. But alas. [The chickens drowned.] Everything ended up underwater. There were cats, too, and she took some dogs — people were leaving, and they left her two dogs. She could have brought the cats up to the attics, but either way, it’s already been so many days — how can the cats survive without water? I don’t know. And she definitely won’t bring the dogs up there because you have to climb up there, and God forbid they bite her. She probably just let them go.

Our town is so small, everybody had their own reserves. But now there are no reserves left, because the water washed them all away. People told me that when there was no drinking water left, they went diving in basements to get compote (Editor’s note: a homemade fruit beverage). Nobody asked anything about humanitarian aid; I don’t even know what the situation is. I watched a video from [the village of] Zaliznyi Port, where they evacuated people, and they were feeding people, distributing things. I watched it closely — what if she’s there?

There’s nobody left there [on her street]. She’s been left alone. I’m in Poland, and we don’t have relatives there [near the flooded area]. We have some in Ukraine, and they would go get her if that were possible. But the odds of that working aren’t very promising; it’s a toss-up, whether you’ll get out alive or not. I got out with my two kids, we were lucky, but other people were shot.

‘Maybe he lost his memory from fear’

Margarita: He’s 81. He’s fallen a few times; he has problems with coordination. There have been times when he’s misremembered his last name. Maybe fear has caused him to lose his memory.

He lived alone. He would talk to everybody: acquaintances, friends, neighbors. He had a whole farm, with chickens, livestock. He was on a pension. He had a garden. He never complained and he didn’t want for anything.

There was shelling [after the start of the full-scale war, before the dam’s collapse]; they dug trenches near [the village of] Korsunka, in the forest. They brought people there whose phones had been found to contain something objectionable, and forced them to dig (Editor’s note: Margarita is referring to civilians abducted by Russian forces from Ukraine’s occupied territories). There were military installations there. It was loud, there was incoming shellfire. He didn’t leave because he wasn’t willing to abandon his home. He had poured his energy, his health into it. Nobody wants to leave their belongings and go to some unknown place.

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On the first day when the Russian army came, they immediately captured the HPP. We immediately found ourselves living under occupation. There were rumors practically from Day 1 that the HPP was mined. Nobody took them seriously.

His house was the closest one to the Dnipro, from the bank. About 15 steps, and there was the river. Everything there flooded. There’s water all the way up to the roof. Now it’s receding, of course, and now I don’t know what the situation is there, but at the beginning, his house was practically underwater. Literally within half an hour, the water had covered everything, especially since it’s the first house from the river, so the current was strong.

The neighbors said that on the very first day, the 6th, someone got him from the roof and evacuated him. They took him somewhere, but to this day, nobody knows where. The neighbors didn’t have any contact with him after that. It’s not clear who evacuated him or where they went. Right now, at this moment, I don’t know where he is. I’m looking at the numbers [the authorities] are giving out, the lists, I’m calling around, but I can’t find his name anywhere. So we’re posting his photo [in social media groups]. Maybe somebody will recognize him.

Interview by Anna Vorobyeva for Cherta Media

Translation by Sam Breazeale