Thousands of residents of southern Ukraine were struggling to escape from flooded homes and towns on Wednesday, and large areas were left without clean drinking water after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.
Ukrainian officials said about 42,000 people on both sides of the Dnipro river, which flows between government-controlled and Russian-occupied territory, were affected after the dam’s collapse sent torrents of water along the war zone’s southern frontline.
They warned civilians to be wary of landmines that had been swept downstream. “Be extremely careful, remember the rules of mine safety! Do not approach or touch explosive objects under any circumstances!” the country’s state emergency service said in a message shared on social media.
More than 180,000 people were left without a source of clean drinking water by the dam’s destruction, said Maxim Soroka, a Ukrainian environmental safety expert at the NGO Dovkola Network.
He said the result would be a “sanitary-ecological disaster”.
Evacuations and rescue operations continued ahead of an expected peak level of flooding on Wednesday after the water swept through dozens of towns.
Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson regional administration, said the intensity of the flooding was decreasing but “due to the significant destruction of the dam, water will continue to rush downstream”.
Prokudin said 1,852 houses had been flooded on the western bank of the river, which remains under Ukrainian control, and 1,457 people had been evacuated.
Police officials said evacuations were complicated by flooded roads and highways in the area.
Farming in the region was also hit: Ukraine’s Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food said 94 per cent of irrigation systems in Kherson region, 74 per cent in Zaporizhia region and 30 per cent in Dnipropetrovsk region were without a water source.
On the other side of the river, Russian-installed officials said water levels appeared to be receding on Wednesday in Nova Kakhovka, a town seized by Russian forces last year.
Located next to the dam, the small town had been swiftly engulfed by flood water on Tuesday. Russian-installed local officials said at least seven people had been reported missing there.
Overnight the waters reached critical levels in several settlements further downstream, completely submerging the settlements of Korsunka and Oleshky.
Russian president Vladimir Putin blamed Ukraine for the collapse of the dam and claimed Kyiv’s western backers had approved efforts to blow it up.
Putin told his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Wednesday that the supposed plot to blow up the dam showed Ukraine was “still making a dangerous bet with the encouragement of its western handlers to escalate combat operations, commit war crimes, openly use terrorist methods and organise sabotage on Russian territory”, according to a Kremlin readout of their telephone call.
The collapse of the dam was “barbaric” and had created “a large-scale ecological and humanitarian catastrophe”, Putin said.
Nikolai Patrushev, Russia’s security council secretary, said on Wednesday that Ukraine had increased the supply of water from upstream and then shelled the dam “to predetermine even more damaging consequences from the flood”, according to Interfax.
Patrushev, a close Putin ally known for his hawkish stance and fondness for conspiracy theories, accused the US and UK of supporting the alleged plot, although he provided no evidence of its existence.
“The US supposedly can’t say who is responsible,” Patrushev said. “At the same time, we know for certain that the Ukrainian armed forces’ activities are co-ordinated with the US, UK and their Nato partners. Thus they were the ones who gave their approval to blow it up and should bear responsibility for this cynical act.”
Authorities announced a state of emergency across the Russian-held territories and spoke of organised evacuations, although as of Wednesday there were no images on local social media of any formal evacuation process.
In his regular evening address on Tuesday, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy reiterated that he believed Russian forces occupying the dam had deliberately blown it up from the inside, while Ukraine’s General Staff of the Armed Forces added it was done in an attempt to disrupt Kyiv’s counteroffensive.
“The disaster at the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant caused by Russian terrorists will not stop Ukraine and Ukrainians. We will still liberate all our land,” Zelenskyy said. “Each Russian act of terrorism increases only the amount of reparations that Russia will pay for its crimes, not the chances of the occupiers to stay on our land.”
The long-awaited military operation to recapture Russian-occupied territory appeared to get under way in recent days, with a spike in assaults along the 1,000km frontline as well as an incursion into Russia’s Belgorod region.
Zelenskyy also warned that the flood would have global consequences and urged the international community to provide support.
“For Africa, Europe, the United States, China, Australia, India, man-made disasters are evil,” he said. “We must stop the Russian evil.”
In New York, UN relief chief Martin Griffiths told the Security Council in an emergency session that the “sheer magnitude of the catastrophe” in Kherson would only be evident in the coming days.
But he said it was already clear that it would 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”.
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