I Cannot Believe We Made It: In the Flood, a Rescue Behind the Front

At night, she had looked at the twinkling lights of her home city, just a mile or so away but a world apart. For months, she had been kept away by the dangers of Russia’s war in Ukraine, stranded on a river island, after the front line shifted while she was on vacation.

To feed her children, she fished in the Dnipro River and scavenged for canned goods in abandoned summer homes. She hid from Russian soldiers who sometimes patrolled the island, and listened in fear as artillery streaked overhead.

Only by the chance of a massive flood washing over the island — and washing away some Russian positions — was Kateryna Krupych able to escape Russian-occupied Ukraine in the south.

The destruction of a dam along the Dnipro river and the flood that followed brought devastation to tens of thousands of people in southern Ukraine. To Ms Krupych and dozens of others, it brought freedom, a chance to reunite with their loved ones.

The journey across the front was perilous. Three people were killed by Russian shooting while trying on Sunday, Ukraine authorities said. It would have been unthinkable before the chaos of the flood opened a window of opportunity allowing Ukrainian special forces soldiers to rescue 132 people from Russian-occupied territory, they said.

“Because of the flood we managed to get home,” said Ms. Krupych, in an interview after staggering out of a rescue boat with her children, barefoot and exhausted but out of Russian occupation for the first time in 15 months.

The Russian-held, eastern bank of the Dnipro River is a low-lying area of reedy swamps and deltaic islands, dotted with small villages and vacation homes for people living in the city of Kherson. In the flood, it became an expanse of open water, with just roofs of houses poking out.

Ms. Krupych lives in Kherson, which fell to the Russians shortly after they invaded early last year. In November, she, her father and her two children were visiting a vacation home on the island when suddenly the front line shifted. Ukrainian forces retook all of the Russian-held territory on the western bank of the Dnipro, including Kherson. The river became the new front. They were stranded, with no way home.

There were no stores on the island. Fearful of arrest by the Russians, Ms. Krupych, 40, did not dare venture deeper into Russian territory.

Instead she called acquaintances and asked to borrow from the pantries of their empty summer homes, and she fished. She and her children, Maksym, 12 and Maria, 4, also hunted for canned goods in the ruins of homes destroyed by shelling.

“That’s how we survived,” she said. “There was no possibility to buy food or go anywhere.”

Maria was too young to understand the predicament, she said, but Maksym became worried and took to biting his nails. “The child was stressed,” she said.

After the dam breach, the family piled into a boat to get to safety in the upper story of a neighbor’s three-story home. While climbing in a window, the roiling water carried away the boat with her father and a neighbor still aboard.

“I desperately screamed, ‘Do something!’” Ms. Krupych said, but the current washed the boat out of view. “They tried but the water took them away into the night.”

For the next 24 hours, she did not know what had become of them, and feared the worst.

Trapped alone with her son and daughter, Ms. Krupych spent the night in despair, shivering and hungry.

Taking advantage of the chaos of the inundation, Ukrainian special forces soldiers, working with drones, managed first to drop food and water to people stranded on rooftops in occupied areas, and then to zip across the front — over the flood-swollen Dnipro River — in motorboats and rescue some.

Colonel Roman Kostenko, a member of Parliament who also serves in the Ukrainian army, said drones were diverted from their usual missions of dropping explosives on Russian tanks to deliver food and water, while the military prepared to send over speedboats.

Before the rescue, Col. Kostenko showed a video shot from a drone of a woman waving from a window of a flooded home. It was Ms. Krupych.

The first hope for Ms. Krupych came at dawn, when she heard the buzz of a drone above the house. She climbed through a mansard window in the roof and watched as it hovered above.

The drone started dropping bottles of water. The aim was not perfect. The first several bottles missed the window, bounced off the roof and tumbled into the water. Then the drone dropped eight bottles, one after the other, into her outstretched hands, she said. It returned about 10 minutes later to drop two bananas and a bag of nuts, wrapped into a bundle with masking tape.

“I could not believe my eyes,” she said. “I was so happy.”

Through the day, the drone visited them several times, each time dropping food or water. “I felt much better knowing my children would have something to eat,” she said. “It was a miracle.”

In the afternoon, a speedboat with Ukrainian soldiers arrived and whisked them to safety. “It was so scary because it was so dangerous for the lives of those soldiers and for us,” she said. “The Russians were so close.”

Ms. Krupych and Maksym waded to shore, while a soldier carried Maria. A crowd gathered and offered the children candy.

“Another day and that would have been it,” said Maksym of the family’s time trapped without food and water on the rooftop.

“I cannot believe we made it,” said Ms. Krupych.

Later that evening, another Ukrainian rescue mission returned with two other survivors: her father and the neighbor.

“All this time we were stranded on the island I could see my city,” she said of her months trapped on the island. “It was so close, but I could not go home.”