Russia strikes school where flood evacuees were sheltering after Zelenskyy visits Kherson

KYIV — Russia unleashed a barrage of missiles on the Ukrainian-held parts of Kherson on Thursday, with eyewitnesses reporting multiple casualties at a school where flood evacuees who fled the rising waters of the Dnipro were sheltering.

The shelling came just after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited a crossing point where people were being evacuated from flooded areas and called for “a clear and quick global response” to Tuesday’s bombing of the Nova Kakhovka dam, which Kyiv and its allies say the Kremlin orchestrated.

“Orcs have just fired at the school building 2 where people from flooded homes were gathering,” said Yevhen Rischuk, the Ukrainian mayor-in-exile of the occupied town of Oleshky, which has been hard-hit by the floodwaters. “Orcs” is the nickname Ukrainians use for Russian forces.

According to multiple eyewitnesses, the shelling targeting major evacuation routes from the city of Kherson, which Ukraine recaptured from Russia’s invading forces in last fall’s counteroffensive. It came as hundreds of volunteers, police officers and journalists from around the world were working around the main routes out of flooded areas and into Kherson.

“They are shelling evacuation spots,” Bogdan Logvynenko, founder of the Ukrainer media project, told POLITICO. Logvynenko has been volunteering in the area since Wednesday.

Ukrainian freelance journalist Kristina Berdynskykh was working when Russian bombs rained down near one of the evacuation points.

“So many boats, so many volunteers, medics, rescuers working when the shelling began. I don’t know how far it was from us. We started running for shelter. We hid in a nearby building and waited there as shelling continued,” Berdynskykh said.

Logvynenko and Berdynskykh said they used a break in the shelling to rush to safety.

On Wednesday, Zelenskyy told Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company, that Russian forces were shooting at Ukrainian rescuers attempting to reach those trapped in flood-struck areas of occupied Kherson. “As soon as our helpers try to rescue them, they are shot at,” Zelenskyy said.

“Russians are shelling the shores and the central district” of Kherson, the region’s governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said in a statement.

Prokudin said that as of Thursday morning, the water level in Kherson had risen by 5.61 meters. He said 600 square kilometers of the Kherson region is under water, of which 32 percent is on the Ukrainian-held right bank of the Dnipro River and 68 percent is on the Russian-occupied left bank.

Before the shelling, both Ukraine and Russia gave a first report on the number of casualties from the flooding, with Ukrainian authorities reporting at least three people had died in the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky, and the Russian-installed mayor of Nova Kakhovka, Vladimir Leontiev, saying five people had drowned in the area.

This is a developing story.