A torrent of water has burst through a huge dam on the Dnipro River that separates Russian and Ukrainian forces, flooding a swathe of the war zone and forcing villagers to flee.
Ukraine and its Western allies accused Russia of blowing up the dam in a deliberate war crime.
The Kremlin said it was Ukraine that had sabotaged the dam, to distract attention from a counteroffensive Moscow claims is faltering. Some Russian-installed officials said the dam had burst on its own.
By mid-morning on Tuesday in the city of Kherson on the Ukrainian-held side, a pier on a tributary of the Dnipro had already been submerged by the surge climbing the banks.
“The water level has so far risen one metre,” resident Oleksandr Syomyk told Reuters. “We’ll see what happens next but we hope for the best.”
The Nova Kakhovka dam supplies water to a swathe of southern Ukraine’s agricultural land, including the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula, as well as cooling the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
The vast reservoir behind it is one of the main geographic features of southern Ukraine, 240km long and up to 23km wide.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy blamed the destruction on “Russian terrorists”.
“The destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam only confirms for the whole world that they must be expelled from every corner of Ukrainian land,” he wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
Russians had “carried out an internal detonation of the structures” of the dam. “About 80 settlements are in the zone of flooding,” he said on Telegram.
NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called it “an outrageous act, which demonstrates once again the brutality of Russia’s war in Ukraine”.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a regular news briefing it was an act of “deliberate sabotage” by the Ukrainian side.
“Apparently, this sabotage is also connected with the fact that having started large-scale offensive actions two days ago, now the Ukrainian armed forces are not achieving their goals, these offensive actions are faltering,” he added.
The UN nuclear watchdog said the Zaporizhzhia power plant should have enough water to cool its reactors for “some months” from a separate pond located above the reservoir, and called for the pond to be spared.
The water level at the town immediately adjacent to the breached dam could rise by up to 12 metres, its Russia-installed mayor, Vladimir Leontyev, said on Telegram.
Some 22,000 people living across 14 settlements in Kherson region are at risk of flooding, Russia’s RIA news agency quoted the Moscow-installed head of the region as saying.
The dam breach came as Ukraine prepares its long-awaited counteroffensive to drive Russian forces from its territory, using newly supplied Western tanks and armoured vehicles.
Moscow has said the Ukrainian offensive began on Sunday and has claimed to have repulsed Ukrainian advances.
Australian Associated Press