The pungent smell of fish fills the air as we approach the banks of the waterway that is on every Ukrainian’s mind this week.
Serhii Sheptyuk has, like many residents along the Dnipro River, put a bucket on the shoreline to track how fast the waterline is receding.
“This is the first time in my life I’ve seen something like this,” the 69 year old said, as he wades through the water, observing what many experts are calling the worst ecological crisis in Ukraine since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.
Sheptyuk alternates between sadness and anger – the latter directed at the Russian military.
“If a monkey sits on a tree branch and you see him cutting his own tree branch off by himself, what else can you say about it? These are the consequences,” he said, adding a few choice unprintable terms to bring the point home. “It’s a cursed nation. [Russia] should have been strangled the moment it was born.”
150 tonnes of industrial chemicals – specifically lubricants – have been washed away due to the dam collapse, President Zelenskyy said. Flood waters will engulf towns, gas stations, and farms — and those waters will “become contaminated by agrochemicals and oil products and then flow into the Black Sea,” The Guardian reported.
Here in Zaporizhzhia, we are standing upstream of Kakhovka Dam, which all available evidence indicates the Russians breached earlier this week – to disastrous results. Engineering and munitions experts told the New York Times that a deliberate explosion inside the Russia-controlled Kakhovka dam was the most likely culprit for the breach.
Downstream of the dam, there has been catastrophic flooding in areas like Kherson. Upstream of the dam, where we are, locals watch the river helplessly as the waterline backs off more and more.
The Dnipro River, after all, is no ordinary waterway. It’s a critical source of fresh drinking water for the residents of the country. Farmers depend on it to water a large portion of the country’s crops.”Pretty much everyone here was engaged with the river in one way or another,” Sheptyuk said.
Historically, most of the shipping in the country flowed up and down the river, stopping at the ports of Kyiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. And the river has marked the boundary between western Ukraine and eastern Ukraine; the line between predominantly Ukrainian-speaking territory and predominantly-Russian territory.
As the waterline continues to fall back, Sheptyuk sees trash in the mud — and he just won’t have it. He wades out into the water barefoot, to pick up glass and discarded fishing equipment.
He has been fishing his entire life along the Dnipro, but mourns the changes due to the war. The ferry that operated along the river is closed down. Now many locals who were fishing no longer do so, due to missile attacks, restrictions and pollution.