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Kakhovka Dam: How locals are leading the recovery in Ukraine’s flooded region [1]
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Date: 2023-07
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.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/kakhovka-dam-destruction-volunteers-recovery-kherson-russia-invasion/
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