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Water rushes through where Yuliia Kravchenko spent her childhood. As a dam explodes, people hope for help, and until then, that the second floor is enough. 

Yuliia Kravchenko and Ella Lamakh are Fellows of Salzburg Global Seminar who participated in the Ukraine Civil Society Forum program Rights, Return, and Reintegration: Dealing with Displacement and Deoccupation. They were interviewed between June 4-8, 2023.

This interview has been translated from German to English. The original article can be found in the Salzburger Nachrichten.

Sometimes they would have swum in the river as early as May, says Yuliia Kravchenko, refugee aid worker. They would have caught crayfish from the river and grilled them. There were many islands, and films were shown on the shore in the open air. Her parents’ house on the banks of the Dnipro river is a precious memory for her. Now water has flooded the rooms, washing over the walls, and filling all the bullet holes. The house was uninhabited, as the family had long since fled the war.

“The buildings are not so important,” says Yuliia Kravchenko. “They can be renovated. But the people there.” She glances nervously at her phone again. Kravchenko is currently attending a conference in Salzburg . It is about future prospects for Ukraine, and about civil society’s plans for the day when the war ends. But there is no end in sight, the new twist written on the faces of all Ukrainian conference participants on Tuesday morning- the three-kilometer Kakhovka dam in the south of Ukraine is half destroyed and continues to collapse. The flooding cannot be controlled. In the town of Nova Kakhovka, which lies directly on the dam, the Russian occupiers declared a state of emergency on Tuesday, saying that the water had already risen by twelve meters. 80 villages are in the flooded area and about 20,000 people are in danger. It is a race against time.

“People were urged to leave their homes or to take shelter at the highest points of their houses with food and wait for help,” described Kravchenko, whose aid organization has provided people in the occupied region with basic necessities. The extent of the disaster is not yet clear. It also fuels concerns about the security of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhya, located 150 kilometers upstream and currently controlled by Russia. The water level in the Dnipro reservoir, from which the nuclear plant draws its cooling water, is falling. The UN nuclear watchdog IAEA has reassured that the water from the reservoir is still sufficient for a few days, says Rafael Grossi, head of the authority. In addition, he said, there is a cooling basin next to the nuclear power plant site that contains additional water for several months, but it is essential that this cooling basin remains intact.

Both warring parties accused each other of blowing up the Russian-controlled dam the night before. “Things are not going well for Russia, the front lines are shifting,” says Yuliia Kravchenko. “The bridge over the Dnipro was used by the Russians to bring technology and military vehicles across when they occupied Kherson. Now the tide is turning and there is a fear that the Ukrainians will use it in the opposite direction.”

Women's rights activist Ella Lamakh, who is also staying in Salzburg but comes from Kherson Oblast, is particularly concerned about the people on the occupied side of the Dnipro River. She has just finished a phone call and shares news: “Evacuations on the liberated side of the Dnipro are in full swing. But we hear that people on the occupied side are not receiving any help. They want to leave, but they are turned away at Russian checkpoints. They don’t want to let them out.” Lamakh speculates that the Ukrainian residents there serve as a protective shield. “As long as they live there, Ukraine will not attack that territory.”

The Kakhovka dam was 30 meters high. It dams the Dnipro just before it flows into the Black Sea to form a huge lake, which itself looks like a sea because of its size. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Russian troops blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant from the inside. At 2:50 during the night, “Russian terrorists” carried out an internal demolition of the hydroelectric power plant, the president explains on the messaging service Telegram. 

Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba condemned the attack on the dam and hydroelectric plant in the Russian-occupied part of Kherson Oblast as a “heinous war crime”. Thousands of civilians are in danger, he said. In addition, at least 150 tons of machine oil have spilled into the river. Another 300 tons of oil are still at risk of spilling, the Ukrainian leadership said on Tuesday. 

Yuliia Kravchenko thinks of places that exist only in her memory now. The tears flow. Even this dam no longer holds.