Sitting on a couch in the small apartment in Auburn that she shares with her teenage son, Olesia Poliancheva said she heard about the destruction of the Kakhovka dam a couple hours after it happened, through a groupchat with people in her hometown of Kherson.
Speaking through an interpreter, Poliancheva said at first she didn’t believe it had really happened.
"I have read about it in our local chat in Kherson," she said. "But I didn't believe in it because someone in this chat wrote that maybe it's a fake. And so I went to sleep, and then in the morning I saw a lot of information about it, so I understood that it's true."
Then, she said, the reality of the situation hit home.
"I felt despair, and I can't believe it. Even now," she said, beginning to choke up.
Kherson, which sits on the banks of the Dnipro River downstream from the dam, has been ravaged by rising floodwaters this week, part of what the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called a “monumental humanitarian, economic and ecological catastrophe.”
Guterres said at least 16,000 people had already lost their homes as of Tuesday, in Kherson and dozens of other towns.
Poliancheva said her cousin’s house, on the opposite bank of the river, has been flooded. She said her house has been spared so far, but the floodwaters are close.
"My house is okay now because it's located higher and far from the water, maybe 200 or 300 meters," she said. "I saw a video today of this one street which is below my house, and it's completely flooded already."
Poliancheva and her son, now 13-years-old, arrived in Maine last summer, through the federal government’s Uniting for Ukraine program that offers a temporary legal status to eligible Ukrainians fleeing the war.
Before the war, Poliancheva was a captain in the Kherson police department. She said watching videos of the rescue efforts is particularly emotional for her, because she sees the familiar faces of some of her former colleagues.
"I'm really proud of them because now they work in unbelievable conditions. And they do this great and very important work," she said.
Speaking at a United Nations Security Council meeting earlier this week, U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood stopped short of explicitly blaming Russia for destroying the dam, which was under its control. Regardless, he said Russia is to blame for the conditions that led to this point, calling the destruction of the damn “yet another casualty in Russia’s brutal, full-scale invasion of Ukraine.”
Olesia Poliancheva said she has no doubt that Russian forces destroyed the dam. Her only question is, why?
"I cry every day when I watch these videos, when I read news, and I just always have [the] question, why? Why are they doing it? For what? What is the goal?" she said.
Still, Poliancheva said she believes Ukraine will overcome this latest tragedy, and, ultimately, win the war.
Language interpretation service for this story was provided by Tetiana Cherednichenko.
