Russia imposed a state of emergency in the parts of Kherson province it controls, where many towns and villages lie in the lowlands below the dam. Residents there have told Reuters by telephone that Russian troops patrolling the streets in waders were threatening civilians who approached.
A zoo by the riverbank on the Russian side flooded, killing all the animals inside, staff said.
The consequences of the disaster will be felt for decades in southern Ukraine. The huge reservoir behind the dam was one of Ukraine’s main geographic features, and its waters irrigated huge swathes of agricultural land in one of the world’s biggest grain-exporting nations, including Crimea, seized by Russia in 2014.
The flood “will have grave and far-reaching consequences for thousands of people in southern Ukraine on both sides of the front line through the loss of homes, food, safe water and livelihoods,” UN aid chief Martin Griffiths told the Security Council. “The sheer magnitude of the catastrophe will only become fully realised in the coming days.”
Targeting dams in war is explicitly banned by the Geneva Conventions. Neither side has presented public evidence demonstrating who was to blame.
“The whole world will know about this Russian war crime,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly address, calling it “an environmental bomb of mass destruction”.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday Ukraine had sabotaged the dam to distract attention from a new counteroffensive he said was “faltering”.
Washington said it was still gathering evidence about who was to blame, but that Ukraine would have had no reason to inflict such devastation on itself.
“Why would Ukraine do this to its own territory and people, flood its land, force tens of thousands of people to leave their homes – it doesn’t make sense,” Deputy US Ambassador to the United Nations Robert Wood told reporters.
Source: CNA
