Ukraine and Russia accused each other on Tuesday of blowing up a dam and causing widespread flooding in southern Ukraine, while Russia said it had thwarted another Ukrainian offensive in eastern Donetsk and inflicted heavy losses.
Russia launched a new wave of overnight air strikes on Kyiv and Ukraine said its air defense systems downed more than 20 cruise missiles on their approach to the city.
The South command of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said Russian forces blew up the Soviet-era Nova Kakhovka dam in occupied Kherson region.
Unverified videos on social media showed intense explosions around the dam and water surging through. The dam, 30 meters tall and 3.2 km long, was built in 1956 on the Dnipro river.
It holds water equal to that in the Great Salt Lake in the U.S. state of Utah and also supplies water to Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, and to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which is also under Russian control.
“The scale of the destruction, the speed and volumes of water, and the likely areas of inundation are being clarified,” the Ukrainian military said on Facebook.
Russian news agencies said the dam had been destroyed in shelling while the mayor of Russia-controlled Nova Kahhovka city was quoted as blaming an act of terrorism – Russian shorthand for an attack by Ukraine.
There was no “critical danger” to the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia facility – Europe’s largest nuclear plant – Russia’s TASS state agency cited a Moscow-backed official in the Zaporizhzhia region as saying.
The Russian installed head of the Kherson region said evacuations near the dam had begun and that water would reach critical levels within five hours.
Reuters could not independently verify the reports and it was unclear whether any of the latest fighting marked the beginning of Ukraine’s long-anticipated counter-offensive.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will hold an emergency meeting over the Nova Kakhova dam blast in southern Ukraine, Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, said on Twitter on Tuesday.
Source: Reuters
