A week after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam caused flooding across the Kherson region, I drove there with Juliy Morozov, a long-established civic activist based in the nearby industrial city of Kryvyi Rih.
The head of Shelter+, a pre-invasion community centre now turned into a shelter and humanitarian hub for internally displaced persons (IDP), Morozov also founded a second local organisation, the Union of Responsible Citizens.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I started the Ukraine Relief Project at forPeace, an all volunteer organisation that gets donations to local Ukrainian organisations to help with humanitarian relief. The destruction of the dam has caused huge flooding, creating severe problems with access to water and health risks. The sheer destruction of homes and property have had a catastrophic effect on the region.
After Juliy and I had discussed what we could really do about both the immediate and long-term consequences of the destroyed Kakhovka dam, we fell into silence.
“Maybe there are things that really have to be done only by the ‘big’ state and organisations,” I said to Morozov, someone with 30-plus years of experience in pushing for social and political change at grassroots level.
We pulled up in Novovorontsovka, a small town on the Dnipro river. Andriy Seletskyi, a man in his 30s, has been appointed to a position of local leadership by Volodymyr Zelenskyi after months of proving his bravery, proactivism and dedication as a local volunteer. Risking his life every time, Seletskyi routinely negotiated green corridors in and out of occupied territories of Kherson so he could bring medicines, food, and other humanitarian aid in, and people out. That was when we first met him.
Seletsky’s hromada (a small administrative area) is facing a total lack of water thanks to the destruction of the dam. Whipping out his phone, he showed us some sketches of wells.
“There are ten old wells in the hromada that we stopped using decades ago,” he told us. “I found them, opened them back up. There is water in them still. And I already got the water tested. It’s safe as technical water [for industrial processes but not drinking]. I want hand pumps – that way we don’t have to waste electricity and we know there won’t be any cases of someone accidentally leaving the pump on and wasting water. I know there are more than those ten [wells]. Serhiy is going through old archival maps to check where there used to be others.”
Serhiy Pylypenko, the head of the hromada’s public utilities, is a childhood friend of Seletsky’s. Serhiy, his wife Nastya, and their children lived under occupation in Kherson for months until they escaped travelling north-east through Zaporizhzhia. Another hromada deputy, Oleksandr Fedornak, is also a childhood friend from the region. Before fighting for Ukraine and Ukrainians became their strongest bond, their lifelong friendship had been forged over a shared love of the region’s history. Rounding out the hromada’s leadership as second in command is Alla Torchanska, who also survived occupation and managed humanitarian aid under intense pressure and risk to her life.
“What an example of why history is so important!” I said to Seletskyi, referring to the wells. “What an example of why local history is so important, not just any history!” he replied.
The walls of his office are lined with maps – old and new – of Novovorontsovka hromada. He points to a map of one of the villages: “It’s not just wells we’re building. We have this mini inlet. We’re going to dam it. The Dnipro always needed smaller dams and reservoirs anyway. And once we dam this reservoir, we can get this dried-up river going again. Right here. Here there used to be a river. It runs across the entire width of the village.”
Seletskyi and his team are not alone. In the days after the dam’s destruction, I began to see coverage in public media of the same sorts of solutions that this hromada was already putting in place: localised, smaller, more resilient and environmentally sound reservoirs to replace the giant Kakhovka Dam.
Running on foot around the hromada, Seletskyi showed us one old well site they had already revived and the work he had started on the dam. The mood, despite the recent catastrophe, was contagious. Contrary to my suggestion in the car hours earlier – “maybe there are things that we really can’t do anything about… this scale of destruction and required reconstruction is all in the hands of much bigger actors” – it seemed being “big” was not the deciding factor in whether you could do something or not. It was being a local that mattered. It was about knowing your home and claiming it as such.
This is what Ukraine has proven at every new stage of this genocidal invasion. Its people keep on doing what experts predict is too big for them to ever accomplish.
The message Ukrainians seem to carry with them everywhere is this: “We’ll survive this, too.” It is a powerful truth. But survival is traumatic – and a burden carried by entire communities experiencing such proximity to death.
When the kind of local knowledge that Seletsky and his friends have is lost, entire communities are left struggling to implement practical solutions for their future: solutions that defy headlines of horror and undercut the billions estimated for reconstruction.
In another neighbouring liberated community, Borozenske, residents had been relying on a handful of private wells for everyone’s water needs under Russian occupation. Even once liberated, due to slow demining efforts, Borozenske remained isolated from the power grid and so still had no running water. The villagers wanted to speed things up by hooking up the water pumps to generators. We went down to talk to the village leader, Halina Lukivna, about the idea.
She told us the type of generators they believed were needed. We found some to test the idea; the test failed. We found a second set of more powerful generators to test; that test failed, too. We brought down an electrician from Kryvyi Rih; he couldn’t figure out why the pumps were not working. We brought in an engineer who had completed a similar project in another village, and his suggestions also failed. The initiative bottlenecked; the community was overwhelmed with everything else it was managing.
One man had run Borozenske’s public utilities for decades. He was the only one who personally knew this system of pumps, pipes, and water towers. But he had been killed by shelling. In those early months of liberation, Borozenske remained in a sort of infrastructural haze because locals, and the vital local knowledge only they held, had been annihilated.
This week, the UK is hosting a vital Ukraine Recovery Conference, with a side event for campaign groups and the non-profit sector at Chatham House. A general consensus among those of us on the ground in Ukraine is that such reconstruction plans must be put in the hands of communities – collaborations between residents, grassroots organisations and local leadership. Of course, these groups are already involved in the process of reconstruction: they have no other choice.
Last summer, Seletskyi was held at gunpoint at a Kherson checkpoint while evacuating a family from the occupied area. Checking his body, Russian soldiers saw a tattoo of geographic coordinates. “What are these?” they asked. He replied: “The coordinates of my hometown, Novovorontsovka.”
A loyalty to home has made Ukraine’s local social networks the most effective form of relief which has been sufficient not only to withstand the Russian invasion, but to push it back. They are already reconstructing the country as we speak.
