More than 2,700 people were evacuated from flooded areas after the collapse of the Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine on Tuesday, Ukrainian and Russian authorities said on Wednesday.
“More than 1,450 people have been evacuated,” Alexander Khorunezhy, a spokesman for emergency services, told Ukrainian television, according to the French news agency AFP.
Authorities installed by Moscow in the region, cited by Russian agencies, said 1,274 people had already been evacuated.
The dam is located in the Kherson region, annexed by Russia, but Ukrainian forces control the part located on the right bank of the Dnieper, while Russian troops control the left bank.
Ukraine and Russia accuse each other of destroying part of the dam that supplies water to the Crimean peninsula, occupied and annexed by Russia in 2014.
Kyiv said Russian troops had planted mines on the structure, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed in October, while Moscow blamed Ukrainian bombardments for the destruction of the dam.
The British military intelligence services, which published a daily assessment of the progress of the war in Ukraine, did not give a reason for the collapse of the dam, citing a “partial collapse” around 03:00 local time on Tuesday.
After about nine hours, “the entire eastern part of the dam and most of the hydroelectric power plants and engineering infrastructure were washed away,” according to a bulletin published by the British Ministry of Defense, military analysts.
“It is likely that the structure of the dam will deteriorate further in the coming days, leading to more floods,” British analysts warned in an assessment published on the social network Twitter.
The same experts said that the water level in the Russian-controlled dam reached “a pre-collapse record high, causing a particularly large amount of water to flood downstream.”
The experts also considered it “unlikely that the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, located 120 kilometers from the dam, will face immediate additional safety problems as a result of the drop in the water level in the reservoir.”
A similar assessment was already made on Tuesday by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has experts at the Zaporozhye NPP.
The international community has generally blamed Russia for the dam’s destruction, but UN Secretary-General António Guterres was cautious in a reaction published on Tuesday.
Guterres said the UN does not have access to independent information about the circumstances of the dam’s collapse, but considers it a “monumental human, economic and environmental disaster” and another “devastating consequence of the Russian invasion” of Ukraine.
Information about the course of the war released by the two sides cannot be immediately verified by independent sources.
The conflict, with an incalculable balance of civilian and military casualties, plunged Europe into what is considered the most serious security crisis since World War II (1939-1945).
Author: Portuguese
Source: CM Jornal
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