About 42,000 people are at risk from flooding on both sides of the Dnipro River after the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam, Ukrainian officials have said, with floodwaters expected to peak on Wednesday.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has condemned the attack on the Nova Kakhovka dam in the Russia-occupied south of his country as “an environmental bomb of mass destruction”. Zelenskiy made the claim in his nightly video address to the nation on Tuesday, adding that only liberation of the whole of Ukraine from the Russian invasion could guarantee against new “terrorist” acts.
Zelenskiy said “hundreds of thousands of people have been left without normal access to drinking water” in a social media message on Wednesday morning. In a read-out from a ministerial meeting, Zelenskiy said the evacuation of people and the urgent provision of drinking water were top priorities. He also accused the occupying Russian authorities in southern Kherson on the left bank of the Dnipro of failing in their duty to evacuate residents, and said Ukraine would appeal to international organisations to assist those people.
The governor of Ukraine’s Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, says that 1,582 houses have been flooded on the right bank of the Dnipro River and some 1,457 people have been evacuated overnight.
Relief workers on the Ukraine-controlled right bank of the river have reported having to work under fire. “The biggest difficulty right now is not the water. It’s the Russians on the other side of the river who are shelling us now with artillery,” said Andrew Negrych, who was coordinating relief efforts for a US charity, Global Empowerment Mission, on Tuesday.
The Russian-imposed mayor of Nova Kakhovka in occupied Kherson, the nearest settlement to the dam, has said seven people are missing and up to 100 people are still trapped, and has claimed that a Ukrainian drone struck during evacuation efforts. Tass reports that Russian occupying forces in the Kherson region have set up “40 temporary accommodation centres … in which there are 345 people. The rest of the evacuees stayed with relatives and friends”. It also quotes Russia’s ministry of emergency situations saying that “a group of 350 rescuers is ready to work in the Kherson region”.
The US “cannot say conclusively” who was responsible, national security council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters at the White House. “We’re doing the best we can to assess”, he said noting “destruction of civilian infrastructure is not allowed by the laws of war”. Earlier Tuesday, NBC News reported that the US government had intelligence indicating Russia was behind the incident, according to two US officials and one western official.
UN aid chief Martin Griffiths told the UN security council that “the sheer magnitude of the catastrophe will only become fully realised in the coming days.” “But it’s already clear that it will have grave and far-reaching consequences for thousands of people in southern Ukraine on both sides of the frontline through the loss of homes, food, safe water and livelihoods,” he added.
The Kremlin has accused Ukraine of deliberately sabotaging the dam. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, told reporters: “We can state unequivocally that we are talking about deliberate sabotage by the Ukrainian side.” He said [Russian president] Vladimir Putin had been briefed on the situation.
Zelenskiy’s chief of staff says he “does not understand” how there could be any doubt that Russian forces blew up the dam. In a statement, Andriy Yermak said: “At 2.50am, Russian troops blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric station and its dam. I do not understand how there can be any doubt about this. Both constructions are located in the temporary Russian-occupied territories. Neither shelling nor any other external influence was capable of destroying the structures. The explosion came from within.”
Yermak also reported that two people have been killed in a drone attack in Sumy on Wednesday morning.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, Ukraine’s governor of Donetsk, one of the occupied regions of the Donbas that the Russian Federation claims to have annexed, has posted a situational update in which he says two people were killed yesterday in the region by Russian shelling.
Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander of the Ukrainian ground forces, has used his Telegram channel to post a video of bodycam combat footage from a forest, with the message that “the defence forces continue to move forward on the flanks, the enemy loses positions near Bakhmut.”
Russia has detained a resident in its far east on suspicion of spying for Ukraine, Russian news agencies reported on Wednesday, citing the Federal Security Service (FSB).
Two towns in Russia’s western Kursk region lost electricity and a man was wounded on Wednesday after Ukraine dropped explosives on an electricity substation near the border overnight, the region’s governor said.
Maria Zakharova, official spokesperson of the Russian foreign ministry, has said that the government in Kyiv could not survive for “a hundredth of a second” without the support of the west, and claimed Ukraine was “blackmailing the world community”.
There seems to be no immediate safety threat to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant 200km downstream from the dam, according to Ukrainian and UN experts. Water from the reservoir affected by the destruction of the dam is used to supply the plant’s cooling systems.
