Ukraine flood victims panic as occupying Russian officials fail to send help

Some entire towns and villages were submerged or washed away by the gushing and still-rising waters released by the catastrophic collapse of the Kakhovka dam Tuesday.

“I’m begging you, please, help my parents. They are trapped. I’ll pay, but just save them,” another woman in Oleshky, an occupied town on the east bank of the Dnieper River that has been almost fully submerged, posted in an evacuation chat group set up by volunteers and relatives. Similar messages were appearing every minute or so.

The cause of the collapse remained unclear Wednesday. Ukraine and Russia have each blamed the other.

The misery unfolding in Oleshky and at least seven other Russian-occupied towns and villages downstream from the dam reflected the damage of nearly 15 months of brutal war and the chaos in a region now governed by officials installed by the Kremlin officials after Ukrainian authorities were ousted.

“The authorities there are not helping,” Yaroslav Vasyliev said. “They are just impeding the process as they are not letting buses and boats that we paid for go through to volunteers.” Vasyliev created a Telegram evacuation chat for Oleshky after hours of trying to get through to a branch of Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations, hoping to save his father, who was stuck on the roof of the family home.

“They were reading the messages but did not do anything, and people were drowning, so I’ve created the group, and volunteers began to join,” Vasyliev said.

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The outskirts of the town are fully underwater, leaving just patches of the city center as a haven for hundreds of families. Vasyliev and other volunteers said rescue missions have fallen almost entirely on the shoulders of residents, who spent the night scouring the area for small boats and emergency supplies.

With no supply routes open, drinking water and food were of particular concern, volunteers said. People were relying on the meager supplies available in the city center.

Anastasia, who declined to give her surname for fear of reprisals, said she was trying to evacuate relatives trapped in Oleshky but buses were being blocked in Radensk, a settlement farther inland in the occupied Kherson region.

Anastasia sent The Post screenshots from her conversation with the bus driver, and other volunteers corroborated her account that buses were unable to travel farther than Radensk.

Ekaterina, the mayor of Radensk, said volunteers were stuck in the town amid shelling from the Ukrainian side. She asked that her last name be withheld; her account could not be verified.

Other people in Oleshky said they could hear steady shelling but could not determine whether it came from Ukrainian or Russian troops.

Natalia Humeniuk, a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian military’s southern command, denied that Ukrainian troops were shelling the area. “We are aware of the scale of the release [of water],” she said. “We do not attack the flooded settlements.”

Natalia Stuklalo told The Post that she and a companion were trapped on the second floor of an unfinished house a few hundred yards from the river in Oleshky. They were hoping to be rescued.

“The situation is awful. The water level has risen above the fence,” she said over an encrypted service. “There are two of us. The other person has Type 2 diabetes. … We have enough food at the moment.”

After a period during which she did not respond to messages, she said Wednesday night that she and her companion had managed to evacuate.

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A woman who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said she the men in her partially flooded neighborhood had recovered a motorboat from the debris and were trying to evacuate people.

“We are trying to help with our own strength,” the woman said. “There are not-quite-flooded areas in the city that allow several male hands to pull out a boat from under the rubble … which will be very useful to us.”

Contacted late Wednesday, the woman said there was still no authority-led evacuation in Oleshky and the people alone weren’t capable of meeting the evacuation needs, for want of motorboats and men willing to go into the flooded areas.

Vasilyev said local volunteers organized special boats to save livestock and pets that were left behind Tuesday as owners fled to safety.

Vladimir Leontiev, the Kremlin-installed mayor of Novaya Kakhovka, said the Nyzhnodniprovskyy National Park, home to endangered species, was flooded.

“Thousands of animals that were there, of course, were also destroyed,” he told state television on Wednesday. “The scale of the catastrophe is enormous.”

Officials in occupied Kherson region said three air units of Russia’s state emergency services had begun operating in the area and that a temporary shelter center had been set up in Skadovsk on the Black Sea.

“In Oleshky, we expect the peak of the rise in water in the coming hours, then it will rapidly retreat,” Andrey Alekseenko said on the region’s official Telegram channel.

The head of the Russian-occupied areas of the Kherson region, Vladimir Saldo, had played down the risk of flooding Tuesday, saying in a video that people continued to go about their day and move through the streets calmly. As he spoke, the administrative building behind him was slowly being overtaken by muddy water.

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On Wednesday, Saldo told Russian television that evacuations were underway in some areas but that few residents wanted to leave. He also claimed that Ukrainian forces had shelled the area over the previous 24 hours.

But by Wednesday evening, at least some of the occupying authorities changed their tone, describing the situation as a “tragedy.”

Alla Barkhatnova, the minister of labor and social policy, said almost 15,000 households in riverside communities in the Kherson region have found themselves in the flood area.

“About 15,000 flooded households, we understand the scale of the tragedy,” she said on local Tavria television on Wednesday.

Rescuers worked through the night, she said, pulling people off rooftops, among other operations.

Saldo continued to insist on Telegram Wednesday evening that the situation was under control. But he listed 35 towns and settlements that were flooded.

The head of the Ukrainian-controlled areas of the Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, said Ukrainian authorities had assessed that two settlements on the east bank of the Dnieper River were submerged and seven were partly flooded. Prokudin were residents on the east bank to leave the area if possible.