Flood on the Dnipro: how “Santa Claus” saved a family

From the attic of a three-story house, Katerina Krupitsch and her two children watched with horror as the tide rose higher and higher in southern Ukraine. The three fled there without food or drink when their small island of Chaika in the Dnipro River was flooded after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam. The first houses sank in the water, hope vanished. But then the mother and children heard a drone buzzing.

“Please help us!” the 40-year-old begged into the drone’s camera when she realized she was coming from the Ukrainian side. “I showed that there are three of us and that we have nothing left to eat or drink,” says Krupitsch through tears. The Border Patrol drone turned and came back with food. A message was stuck to a plastic bottle: “Hold on. Don’t panic. You will be evacuated,” said the note – signed “Santa Claus”. Krupitsch wept with relief.

Finally, on Wednesday evening, a rescue team reached the island and then took the family to the city of Kherson. The drone video of the desperate mother’s call for help went viral on social media in Ukraine.

The Krupitschs had been living under Russian occupation on the tiny island near the town of Oletschky for more than a year; only a dozen people remained there. “We were cut off from the world all these months,” Krupitsch describes her situation at the time. They fished and ate the supplies left behind by neighbors.

Border guards with a drone rescue family on the Dnipro

When the dam was blown up on Tuesday last week, for which Kiev and Moscow blame each other, the Dnipro swelled. Both the Ukrainian-controlled northern bank and the Russian-controlled southern bank were extensively flooded. Several people died and many more were injured.

“I saw the Russians flee,” says Krupitsch. The water had risen very quickly, “every half hour ten centimeters”. First it came to her ankles, soon to her knees. When it became too dangerous in the family’s one-story house, she fled to the attic of the three-story house next door. “It was scary to see the water in our house rising up to the windows. Then it reached the roof and that too started to disappear.”

The family owes their rescue to a Ukrainian border guard who spotted them with his drone. He piloted the DJI Mavic 3, a camera drone. In times of peace, weddings would like to be filmed with it, explains the 31-year-old. “In the war we learned to use them a little differently.” Now it is used for surveillance – and for the first time also for throwing food into a small skylight.

It was this border guard who stuck the reassuring message on the water bottle. Why did he sign “Santa Claus”? He is called that because of his beard, says the man, who wants to remain anonymous because of his job and hides his face behind a mask.

For Krupitsch and her children, this “Santa Claus” in camouflage clothes is their savior. She wants to keep his note with the message as a reminder. Krupitsch is convinced: “He is my guardian angel.”