A 28-year-old Ukrainian medic, Helena Popova, traveled from Lutsk to Kherson last Friday to help victims of the flood caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam. She went “just to stay sane,” she told me. Across the Dnipro River, in her hometown of Oleshky, thousands of people, including her parents, younger sister, and grandfather, urgently needed food, evacuation, and medical attention.
There Oleshky was, less than ten miles away from her, across an expanse of river and floodwater. The Dnipro was the front line, and Oleshky sat on the Russian-controlled side. When Ukrainian boats tried to ferry help from the right bank to the left, the Russians opened fire. After a day of work in the Ukrainian-controlled area, Popova was soaking wet in her shorts and T-shirt. Now she stood in the rain, looking desolately across the water to where her loved ones lay beyond reach.
That Ukrainians can’t get help to their friends and family in the Russian-held flood zone is tragic but not surprising. Less explicable is the failure of international aid organizations, including the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which have been conspicuously absent from the Dnipro’s left bank. A little more than a week ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed his dismay at the agencies’ nonappearance: “They aren’t here; we have not had a response.”
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The trouble, as volunteers like Popova know, is that crossing the Dnipro is manifestly dangerous. On Tuesday, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs explained that Russia had “yet to provide the safety guarantees we need to cross the front line to the left bank of the Dnipro, including to Oleshky.” As a UN representative, Saviano Abreu, said to me, “Our priority is to keep negotiating.” But assurances from Russia are not forthcoming.
For Ukrainian volunteers who have been delivering food and rescuing people and animals for the past week, the UN’s timidity is maddening. Unsafe conditions have not stopped local efforts, at a cost in lives: On Sunday, Russia fired on a Ukrainian rescue boat, killing three people. In the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Kherson region, volunteers supply water and food and have evacuated thousands of victims; still, at least 10 people have died and 40 are missing. Kherson victims told volunteers that their houses filled with water in mere minutes.
At the pace the UN and the ICRC are moving, “it will be too late to rescue people soon,” says Roman Timofeyev, the manager of the Ukrainian Rescue Now foundation, whose 56 social workers and more than 100 volunteers help war victims.
The Russian-controlled side of the river has likely fared worse than the Ukrainian-controlled side. Popova has kept a haunting recording of the last phone call she had with her parents and 12-year-old sister, Vika, on June 6, the day the dam exploded. The family was walking through chest-deep water, and Vika screamed into the phone: “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to sink!” Her 70-year-old grandfather was trapped on an upper floor of a house whose first floor was entirely underwater. Popova’s mother told her: “People were on their roofs, screaming ‘Help, help!’ but nobody came.”
The Khutorishe neighborhood of Oleshky saw water levels rise above 16 feet and completely submerge the roofs of some single-story houses. One witness I spoke with on Saturday said that the current in her street was too powerful for even good swimmers to fight. She saw a neighbor die. Those who have made it out of the flood zone have taken their places in endless lines to collect humanitarian aid, Yulia Gorbunova, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, told me on Tuesday. There is not nearly enough to go around. “It is a catastrophe,” Gorbunova told me. “Nobody evacuates these poor people.”
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The slow work and scant presence of deep-pocketed international aid organizations has become the subject of bitter commentary in Ukraine. In one popular meme, the word useless is superimposed on a photograph of UN SUVs parked in Kyiv. Oleksandr Mosiako, the head of communications for the Ukrainian Rapid Response Group, sent me photographs he had taken himself of six UN SUVs. “These vehicles are prepared to drive in water more than a meter deep. But they have been parked for several months in the center of Kyiv, near a five-star hotel,” he told me. “They are useless.”
Michael Bociurkiw, a Ukraine analyst at the Atlantic Council, says that the international organizations’ response betrays “shameful indifference.” That there has been no rescue mission to the occupied territory in the full week since the dam attack is bad enough; in addition, he told me, “some world players do not dare to come out even with clear and strong statements that would condemn this new Russian war crime.”
Many Ukrainians distrusted the UN and ICRC even before this disaster. They see the agencies as adopting a posture of neutrality that prizes dialogue with Russia over the protection of Ukrainians. In April, UN Secretary General António Guterres visited Moscow to discuss humanitarian concerns in Ukraine with Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The visit played very poorly with the Ukrainian public, as did Lavrov’s subsequent visit to UN headquarters in New York City. Peter Maurer, the president of the ICRC, traveled to Moscow in the midst of the battle for Kyiv last year as a “neutral, impartial humanitarian actor.” Many Ukrainians rejected the suggestion that a humanitarian actor could be impartial in a conflict where one side had invaded its neighbor and was shelling civilians.
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The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement has autonomous naitonal organizations across the globe and involves the work of more than 10 million people. The Russian Red Cross, established in 1867, is one such society that could be rescuing victims in flooded areas of the Kherson region. But if it has done so, it has kept its efforts quiet; its website reports no such operation, and its representatives have not responded to requests for comment. A Human Rights Watch report released this week said that Russian authorities started conducting “sporadic evacuations” from Oleshky almost a week after the catastrophe.
The Ukrainian Red Cross Society has been active in relief efforts since the start of the war, having distributed 8,800,656 kits of humanitarian aid and evacuated 308,338 civilians. But its members often find that ordinary Ukrainians confuse them with the ICRC and misdirect their outrage.
With regard to the flood victims, Anton Dubovyk, a coordinator’s assistant at the Mykolaiv branch of the Ukrainian Red Cross Society, does not think that the criticism of the ICRC’s slow reaction is entirely fair. “The ICRC has no access to Oleshky,” he told me. “They cannot hire tanks, helicopters, or armored boats to storm into Oleshky and rescue people.” His organization is doing what can be done, he said: “We have been providing medical care, humanitarian aid, and transportation for hundreds of evacuees of the Kherson region on this side of the river.”
According to Ukrainian reports, Oleshky, a town of 25,000 people, is currently 90 percent underwater. Other low-lying settlements in the Kherson region are in a similar situation. Every day now, Popova boards rubber boats, or aluminum motorboats that foreign NGOs have provided, and helps dress the wounds of flood victims, many of them farmers.
As the days go by without word from her family, she grows mystified by the purpose of international aid groups that seem so easily stymied by the conditions of war.
“This is a painful matter,” she told me. “Here we all count only on each other.”