Evacuations from flooded areas in Ukraine’s Kherson region, following the early Tuesday morning explosion of the Kakhovka dam, continue on Wednesday as the water level in the lower Dnieper River rises and begins to slow in Nóvaya Kajovka, the town that housed the reservoir and the destroyed hydroelectric power station.
The pro-Russian authorities in the part of Kherson occupied by Moscow troops report seven missing due to the flooding and almost 1,300 people evacuated. The Kiev emergency services assure that on the Ukrainian side, on the right bank of the Dnieper, there are already some 1,500 residents made safe; altogether there would be some 2,800 inhabitants evacuated so far.
Referring to the disappeared, the head of the Russian Occupation Administration of Novaya Kajovka, Vladimir Leontiev, maintains that “they were shepherds, they were there, about seven people whom we know for sure and now nobody knows their whereabouts.” For his part, Vladimir Saldo, Moscow-appointed interim head of the occupied part of Kherson, has declared that “between 22,000 and 40,000 people are currently in the disaster zone.” It is also reported that 1,852 houses were flooded on the Ukrainian side and 2,700 houses on the pro-Russian side.
There are locations completely underwater. The Ukrainian president, Volodímir Zelenski, put them at 80. Social networks show neighbors waiting on the roofs of their flooded houses for rescue teams to arrive by boat. On the pro-Russian side, Korsunka is totally submerged. In the city of Kherson, under kyiv control, the water has reached the center, but the vehicles continue to circulate with the flooded streets. The municipal authorities believe that, in the next twenty hours, the water level in the city may rise another meter. However, in Nóvaya Kajovka, where the water in the center reaches more than a meter, the flow has stopped rising.
Balance assures that “the operational-tactical situation after the destruction of the hydroelectric plant plays in favor of the Russian military”, who, however, according to the Ukrainian agency UNIAN, are withdrawing from the fortified positions that they maintained in the vanguard and are marching. to the south. UNIAN shows videos of Russian soldiers retreating in knee-deep water. The North American chain CNN, citing Western officials, assures that the Ukrainian Army is going to have to “reprogram” its operations in the area, since the floods are damaging bridges and roads.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Agriculture reports that “about 10,000 hectares of arable fields were flooded” in the kyiv-controlled part of Kherson. The same source also assures that 94% of the irrigation systems in Kherson, 74% in Zaporizhia and 30% in Dnipropetrovsk have been left without water supply, a circumstance that, in their opinion, “could turn the southern fields of the Ukraine on wastelands”. They believe that the catastrophe will also affect the fishing industry due to the massive death of fish in the Dnieper.
The pro-Russian authorities in Kherson have today extended the state of emergency to the entire region. Previously, they declared such a situation only in Nóvaya Kakhovka and its surroundings. At the same time, the Russian Investigation Committee (SK in its Russian acronym) has opened a criminal case for “terrorism”, for the blowing up of the dam. “As a result of criminal actions by the armed formations of Ukraine, the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station occurred, which led to the flooding of settlements in the Kherson region,” the department notes. Nothing is said in the text about how the investigators were able to go to the site, collect evidence so quickly, carry out checks and file charges against the Ukrainian side.
Moscow denies any involvement in the attack on the dam and blames the Ukrainian troops for it. Russia’s representative to the United Nations, Vasili Nebenzia, declared yesterday that Ukraine “admitted in December its intention to blow up the Nóvaya Kajovka dam” and refers to an article in ‘The Washington Post’ in which it is stated that the Army Ukrainian even carried out HIMARS missile strikes against one of the dam’s locks. The response of the Ukrainian representative to the UN, Sergui Kislitsya, was that Russia “blames its crimes on others” and recalled Mariupol, Bucha, Izium and the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant.
“Let me point out that Russia has been in control of the dam and the entire Kakhovka power station for more than a year. It is physically impossible to somehow blow it up from the outside by bombing. It has been mined and blown up by the Russian occupiers,” Kislitsia said. Telegram channels show a video, whose veracity is not proven, at the moment, on the night of Monday to Tuesday in which a part of the dam supposedly explodes, partially collapses and ends up being gradually destroyed by the strong push of the water flow. In his daily address on October 21, 2022, amid massive Russian attacks on Ukrainian power facilities, Zelensky accused Russian troops of mining the Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power station. He already then said he feared “a large-scale catastrophe.”
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