More than a hundred evacuees. How brave Kherson Territorial Defense fighters took people out of occupied villages

After the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam was blown up, the water first came to the occupied villages and towns on the left bank of the Dnipro. The occupiers abandoned some of them, leaving the locals to fend for themselves. People were trapped, not knowing where to ask for help. Among them is a family from near Oleshky, to whom the Ukrainian military dropped water from a drone. The story of how the territorial defense fighters rescued a mother and her two children impressed many Ukrainians.

hromadske spoke to the battalion commander whose soldiers evacuated this and other families from the occupied territories. They said that when they first went to the left bank of the Dnipro, they did not know whether they would meet Russians there.

An olive-colored motorboat is floating on a flooded street in Kherson. It is driven by two men in civilian clothes. Behind them are three people – an elderly couple and their daughter, a middle-aged woman, and animals in cages. The boat docks, and a policeman and a soldier run up to it to help the people and animals get to land.

The elderly people go up the street and sit on a bench under the shade of the trees. The woman is wearing a blue house coat with white specks and pajama pants. She wears only socks, her left foot is swollen and tied with a bandage. The man is also without shoes.

“Were you scared?” I ask the woman.

“I didn't have time,” she replies, smiling.

The woman's name is Lidiia, and her husband's name is Ivan. They say they came from Kokhany. Kokhany is a small village in Kherson Oblast. Ivan says that about fifty retired summer residents lived there. They also have a summer house there and an apartment in Kherson. According to the Deep State map, Kohany is occupied. Back on June 6, the Russians were there.

As soon as the water started coming up at night, the Russians left, says Ivan. They did not organize an evacuation. His family was waiting for rescue on the second floor of the house.

“There's no food there, everything on the first floor is flooded. It's good that my daughter took a loaf of bread – that's how we survived the day,” says the pensioner.

On June 7, they were rescued by boats by the two men mentioned at the beginning of the text.

“These guys are specialists who know the places to go,” Ivan says when asked who saved his family.

“No one wanted to go, but they did”

The “specialists” are actually soldiers of the 124th separate territorial defense brigade. This is a Kherson-based brigade, with many locals fighting in it, including those from the left bank of the Dnipro. The battalion commander, whose soldiers were the first to sail to the occupied territories, told hromadske how it happened. He asked that his name not be disclosed.

According to the commander, one of his soldiers received a call from his friends asking him to rescue seven adults and a child from the occupied territories.

“We started calling our friends and services, but could not resolve the issue within a few hours, so we had to go ourselves,” the commander says.

At that time, the territorial defense fighters did not know what was happening in the occupied territories and whether the Russians were holding their positions. But several military men offered to go there and try to evacuate people from the left bank.

“We did not know that the Russians had withdrawn. They put on civilian clothes and left. No one wanted to leave, but they did,” the commander recalls.

One of his battalion officers led the evacuation and sailed to the left bank. Since most of the battalion's soldiers are from Kherson Oblast, they know the area well. After the first successful evacuation, the soldiers of the 124th Brigade began to constantly travel along the Dnipro River and take people out of the occupied territories and the gray zone. They received information through personal contacts and rescuers who received calls asking for rescue. After the first successful evacuations, soldiers from other units and volunteers joined in.

While working in Kherson on June 6-9, hromadske journalists observed how the military brought people from the occupied territories every day. According to the battalion commander, the Ukrainian military has evacuated more than 100 people since the dam explosion.

Meetings with Russians

As the battalion commander explains, his soldiers decided to dress in civilian clothes so that they would not be identified as Ukrainian military. This may have saved them from clashes with the Russians. During the evacuations, Ukrainian soldiers crossed paths with the Russian military twice, the commander says.

“But at that time, there were no clashes, because all the soldiers were unarmed and in civilian uniforms. The Russians were also panicking, and a large part of the enemy left the area. According to our information, they were flooded and did not really understand what was happening. There were a few cases when we crossed paths with them at a distance of 10-15 meters, but they did not take any action. Perhaps they thought we were locals or volunteers,” the commander speculates.

The battalion commander says that the Russians took out some collaborators and left the rest of the civilians behind. Evacuated residents from the occupied territories told him that the situation on the other side of the Dnipro is critical.

“There are many dead on the left bank. I personally talked to people who are being evacuated. They told me that there are many dead people in the houses, no one is evacuating, there is no electricity, water, gas, there is no civilization in this place,” the battalion commander said.

The first evacuations from the area of occupied Oleshky and the surrounding villages were organized by four soldiers of his battalion who offered to go there themselves. When the military command learned about this initiative of the soldiers, in particular from the video of the evacuation that was obtained by hromadske, they decided to honor them. These soldiers of the 124th Territorial Defense Brigade were nominated for the award “For Courage” of the third degree.