Water burst through a hole in a dam on the Dnipro River that separates Russian and Ukrainian forces in southern Ukraine on Tuesday, flooding a an area of the war zone and forcing thousands of villagers to flee.
Ukraine accused Russia of blowing up the dam from the inside in a deliberate war crime. Russian-installed officials blamed Ukrainian shelling, others saying the dam had burst on its own in conflicting reports.
The Nova Kakhovka dam supplies water to Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant which are both under Russian control.
The destruction of the dam creates a new humanitarian disaster in the middle of the war zone and transforms the front lines just as Ukraine is unleashing a long-awaited counteroffensive to drive Russian troops from its territory.
Russia has controlled the dam since early in the war, although Ukrainian forces recaptured the northern side of the river last year. Both sides had long accused the other of planning to destroy it.
„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,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy 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.
The Russian-installed governor of Ukraine’s Kherson region accused Kyiv of striking the dam with missiles to distract attention from what he said were the failures of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the east. However, other Russian-installed officials said the dam had burst on its own due to earlier damage.
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