More than 2,700 people have been evacuated from flooded areas following Tuesday’s destruction of the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine, Ukrainian and Russian authorities announced Wednesday.
“More than 1,450 people have been evacuated,” emergency services spokesman Oleksandre Khorounejii told Ukrainian television, according to the French news agency AFP.
The authorities installed in the region by Moscow, quoted by Russian authorities, have announced that 1,274 people have already been evacuated.
The dam is located in the Kherson region, annexed by Russia, but Ukrainian troops control the part on the right bank of the Dnieper River, and Russian troops control the left bank.
Ukraine and Russia accuse each other of destroying part of the dam that supplies water to the Crimean peninsula occupied and annexed by Russia in 2014.
Kiev said Russian troops had placed mines on the structure, as alleged by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in October, and Moscow blamed Ukrainian bombing for the destruction of the dam.
British military intelligence, which daily assesses the course of the war in Ukraine, has not attributed a cause to the dam’s destruction, citing a “partial collapse” around 3 a.m. local time on Tuesday.
About nine hours later, “the entire eastern part of the dam and much of the hydroelectric and utility infrastructure has been washed away,” military analysts said in the British Ministry of Defense bulletin.
“It is likely that the structure of the dam will deteriorate further in the coming days, causing more flooding,” British analysts warned in the assessment released on the social network Twitter.
The same experts said the water level in the Russian-controlled dam had “reached record levels before the collapse, resulting in a particularly large amount of water flooding the downstream area”.
The experts also considered it “unlikely that the nuclear power plant of Zaporijia, located 120 kilometers from the dam, will immediately face additional safety problems due to the drop in water level in the reservoir”.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has experts at the Zaporijia plant, had already conducted an identical assessment on Tuesday.
The international community at large blamed Russia for the dam’s destruction, but UN Secretary-General António Guterres was cautious in a response released Tuesday.
Guterres said the UN has no access to independent information about the circumstances of the dam’s destruction, but considers it a “monumental human, economic and environmental catastrophe” and another “devastating consequence of the Russian invasion” of Ukraine.
Information about the course of the war released by the two sides cannot be immediately verified by independent sources.
With countless civilian and military casualties, the conflict plunged Europe into what is considered the most serious security crisis since World War II (1939-1945).
Source: DN
