In Russia-occupied Kherson, flood aid slow to come: Residents

For days, a Ukrainian teenager has waited in the attic, just down the street from the cemetery of her flooded town, marking time with her 83-year-old grandfather and two other elderly people and hoping for help to escape the deluge of a catastrophic dam collapse.

For days, a Ukrainian teenager has waited in the attic, just down the street from the cemetery of her flooded town, marking time with her 83-year-old grandfather and two other elderly people and hoping for help to escape the deluge of a catastrophic dam collapse.

But help is slow in coming to Oleshky, a Russian-occupied town across the Dnipro river from the city of Kherson with a pre-war population of 24,000, according to those stranded and their desperate Ukrainian rescuers. Russian forces are taking rescuers’ boats, they say. Some say the soldiers will only help people with Russian passports.

“Russian soldiers are standing at the checkpoints, preventing (rescuers) from approaching the most affected areas and taking away the boats,” said one volunteer, Yaroslav Vasiliev. “They are afraid of saboteurs, they suspect everyone.”

So 19-year-old Yektarina But and the three elderly people with her simply wait, along with thousands of others believed to be trapped by floodwaters spread across 600 square kilometres (230 square miles) of the Kherson region. About two-thirds of the flooded areas are in territory occupied by Russia, officials said.

The group in the attic have no electricity, no running water, no food. The battery on But’s mobile phone is dying.

“We are afraid that no one will know about our deaths,” she said in a brief phone interview, her voice trembling.