Miracle Boats Secretly Snatch Families Putin Left to Drown

KHERSON, Ukraine—When the small dinghy pulled up from the flooded streets to dry land, a young man and a few older people piled onto shore, greeted by hugs from desperate relatives. One older woman pulled the man close and began sobbing, saying “You are home! You are home!” over and over again.

Despite the scenes of joy, “Mushroom,” the call sign of a young Ukrainian soldier next to us, was nervous, pacing back and forth across the half-submerged street that was now a makeshift dock. It wasn’t the shelling audible in the background—any Ukrainian soldier has experienced that dozens of times. “One hour ago, our guys left to bring back a family with young children,” he told The Daily Beast. “And we haven’t heard from them since.”

Any number of things could have gone wrong. The flooded city streets were full of explosive hazards. The swelled riverbanks had washed mines from battlefields in frontline positions on both sides of the river, where Russian and Ukrainian soldiers had been positioned. The boats are piloted by courageous rescuers, Ukrainian special boat troops wearing disguises that camouflaged them from the enemy. As far as we could tell, they were unarmed.

The destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam last week caused immense flooding on both sides of the river. While the Ukrainians have engaged in an intense effort to evacuate civilians from the side they control, Russian forces have been accused of offering almost no assistance to those stranded on the side of the river they occupy. The Ukrainians are involved in a high risk effort to evacuate their own civilians from enemy-occupied territory in Kherson.

Despite being forced to retreat from the flooded regions, Russian forces have continued to have fire control over both banks of the river. They have been accused of remorselessly shelling civilian evacuations on both sides of the river.

“We were on the seventh floor of our building,” 84-year-old Antonina, who was rescued by a Ukrainian crew on Saturday, told The Daily Beast. She added that “the flooding had reached the fourth floor and was rising” by the time she was rescued. Her son had helped carry her down to the fourth floor, and they climbed through a window to be picked up by a waiting crew.

Sources who spoke with The Daily Beast did not want to disclose their last names, as all of them still have family members in occupied areas of Ukraine. After being allowed on separate boats to follow the rescuers from a safe distance, The Daily Beast observed a horrendous flurry of shelling targeting boats with evacuated civilians onboard.

Our boat was driving through waterlogged streets when a series of Russian missiles began slamming into the water around us. Two evacuation boats zipped past us, as the crew members waved and shouted: “Incoming fire, they’re shooting evacuations!”

The boat crews and their passengers drove to the sides of the river to shelter under whatever cover they could find. If they were lucky, next to the walls of an apartment block—but some were simply hiding under thin layers of foliage.

The Ukrainian army is frequently informed of Russian positions and movements in occupied regions by a network of Ukrainian partisans. Some of them are former military or police, but most are ordinary citizens enraged by what the Russians have done to their communities.

“These can be anyone,” a senior Ukrainian military source, originally from an occupied town that was liberated last year, told The Daily Beast. “When there was fighting in my city, my best contact was my old taxi driver, a man who had never shown any interest in politics before. I expected him to be the type who did not care whether the Russians took over or not—instead he risked his life by driving around and taking photos of Russian troops and vehicles. He would then send them to me, and I would forward them straight to our artillery guys, and then… boom!”

Usually, these networks are used for targeting purposes, but in the Kherson region, their crucial role is to locate safe places for boats to dock. There is usually a trusted middleman to reduce the risk of a partisan’s identity being revealed. The civilians would wait for a time and a place to be dictated by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, where they would hopefully be whisked away to safety.

‘Ukraine Leaves No One Behind’

Not all make it out alive. Ukrainian authorities reported that three people have been killed in such evacuations so far, with 23 others wounded during another run on Sunday.

Large parts of Kherson city have become completely flooded. Up and down the canals of Kherson, Ukrainian forces have been conducting some of their most daring and dangerous operations to date. Since the very first day of the flooding, highly trained Ukrainian boat teams have been crossing the river under heavy fire to evacuate civilians trapped on the eastern bank.

Russian forces have been accused of abandoning Ukrainians desperate to escape the floods in Kremlin-occupied regions. They have even refused to allow them through checkpoints they have set up in the region to get to safer ground, Mushroom said. But the Ukrainian Army is eager to show that they can save everyone.

It's not the first time that Ukraine has established daring rescue operations behind enemy lines. Ukrainian soldiers, including Mushroom, repeated one regular message to us: “Ukraine leaves no one behind.”

During the siege of Mariupol last year, when the city was surrounded and cut off, Ukrainian helicopter pilots would conduct daring night-time infiltrations into parts of the city that were cut off and surrounded. There, they dropped off supplies and would load wounded patients to spirit them away to hospitals in free areas of Ukraine.

This time, Mushroom was hoping that they could rescue at least a dozen people per day, mainly from the cities of Hola Prystan and Oleshky just over the river. But the Russians are suspected of abandoning thousands in other towns and cities, and there is little that Ukraine can do for most of them. “As much as we want to help, we can’t send thousands of troops to their deaths,” a Ukrainian commander told The Economist.

Even those evacuated still face an uphill battle.

“The Russian army retreated from [our area], but our house isn’t visible anymore” said Ira, a Ukrainian woman who had been evacuated with her children. “We lived next to the river, the water came up so quickly. We had finally gotten used to the constant shooting next to us, and now we are left without a house at all. We will have to start everything from scratch, and learn to live again.”

Despite the hardships, some of the stories do have a happy ending.

After disappearing for more than two hours, a small boat arrived to unload the family Mushroom had been waiting for. They were disheveled and tired, but alive—and finally home.