Russia conceals actual casualties from hydroelectric power station bombing, at least hundreds killed – AP

The Russian occupying administration has deliberately concealed the true number of casualties in the floods in Kherson Oblast caused by Russia's blowing up of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, with at least hundreds of people killed in the town of Oleshky (Kherson Oblast) alone. Source: Associated Press (AP) citing medical workers, rescue volunteers, people who fled the occupied territory, informants who passed information from there to Ukrainian security services Quote from AP: "An AP investigation has found Russian occupation authorities vastly and deliberately undercounted the dead...

Russian authorities took control of the issuance of death certificates, immediately removing bodies not claimed by family, and preventing local health workers and volunteers from dealing with the dead, threatening them when they defied orders.

Russia ... has said 59 people drowned in the territory it controls, roughly 408 square kilometres (160 square miles) of flooded areas. But in the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky alone ... the number is at least in the hundreds." Details: The agency spoke to three medical workers who kept records of the dead in Oleshky, one volunteer who buried the bodies, and two informants who passed intelligence from the area to the Ukrainian Security Service. They reported that the mass graves had been dug up and the unidentified bodies taken away and never seen again.

The journalists also interviewed about a dozen other residents, rescue volunteers and people who had recently fled the area. The AP also took into account information from the closed Oleshky-related Telegram channel, where residents reported bodies lying on the streets, corpses collected by the police, and missing people. Quote from AP: "Together, these accounts reveal a calculated attempt by Russian authorities to cover up the true cost of the dam collapse, which the AP has found was likely caused by Moscow.

Residents of Oleshky fear their enduring traumas risk being forgotten as the war grinds on, and their beloved once idyllic home is gradually depopulated." More details: Local residents said representatives of the occupying authorities were nowhere to be seen over the first three days of the flood, and they had apparently fled despite initially asking people not to worry. Svitlana, the chief nurse of the Oleshky District Multidisciplinary Hospital, the city's primary healthcare centre, who coordinated the collection of death certificates, reported that the rotting of bodies had caused the corpses to bloat and "people were floating around the city like balloons".

Learn more: "We are not afraid, we have sailed home." Ukrainska Pravda on high water and evacuation in Kherson

AP reported that the Russian State Emergency Service arrived back in Oleshky on the afternoon of 9 June. Doctors were prohibited from issuing death certificates to flood casualties.

However, they were still allowed to issue certificates for other causes of death. Svitlana and Olena, her nurse co-worker at the hospital, said they were informed of the new rule verbally. They were told that flood victims would have to be sent for autopsies to medical facilities in other parts of Kherson Oblast (the settlements of Kalanchak, Skadovsk and Henichesk), where, after a forensic medical examination, certificates would be issued by doctors authorised by the occupying authorities to give them.

Relatives could not bury their family members without this crucial document. Svitlana explained that she approached the police requesting an "official order" confirming the change in the existing policy, which had been in place since March. She said they did not have it and responded to her request with threats.

"They said: 'You will suffer the consequences for doing this.'" Every day, police officers would come to the hospital to make copies of the death certificates issued by doctors and make sure that the rules were being followed. "You need to understand under what circumstances we worked there - under the FSB, police, prosecutors," Svitlana noted. The hospital sent just under 50 bodies to autopsy centres.

However, as AP says, the Russians gave residents certain phone numbers to call the police, who sent people to pick up the bodies, bypassing the hospital. At the same time, family members were charged RUB 10,000 [roughly US£100] as a fee for the service. Those who did not have that kind of money begged doctors to record a different cause of death, such as heart attack, so they could be buried quickly, the two nurses said.

Bodies that were not searched for by relatives simply disappeared.

"Not just Russia, but even Ukraine doesn't realise the scale of this tragedy," Svitlana noted.

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