For days, the 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 Dnieper River from the city of Kherson with a prewar 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.
"Everything around us is flooded," she said. "There is still no help." Her grandfather, who had suffered a stroke, was running out of medicine, she said. One woman with her, a neighbour's grandmother, could not move on her own.Viktoria Mironova-Baka said she has been in touch from Germany with relatives stuck in the flooded region.
This region has suffered terribly since Russia invaded Ukraine early last year, enduring sometimes-relentless artillery and missile attacks. The floods ruined crops, displaced land mines, caused widespread environmental damage, and set the stage for long-term electricity shortages. The floodwaters have irrevocably changed the landscape downstream, and shifted the dynamic of the 15-month-old war.
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