Ukrainians face homelessness, disease as floodwaters crest from destroyed dam
Ukrainians abandoned their inundated homes as floodwaters crested across a swathe of the south on Wednesday after the destruction of a vast dam on the front line between Russian and Ukrainian forces that each blamed on the other.
Residents waded through flooded streets carrying children on their shoulders, dogs in their arms and belongings in plastic bags while rescuers used rubber boats to search areas where the waters reached above head height, Reuters reported.
Ukraine said the flood would leave hundreds of thousands of people without access to drinking water, swamp tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land and turn more into deserts.
The disaster at the Nova Kakhovka dam coincides with a looming long-awaited counteroffensive by Ukrainian forces, seen as the next major phase of the war. Each side accused the other of continuing to shell across the floodzone and warned of drifting landmines unearthed by the flooding.
Kyiv said on Wednesday its troops in the east had advanced by more than a kilometre around the ruined city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, its most explicit claim of progress since Russia reported the start of the Ukrainian offensive this week. Russia said it had fought off the attack.
Residents in the flood zone in the country’s south blamed the bursting of the dam on Russian troops who controlled it from their positions on the opposite bank. Russia imposed a state of emergency in the parts of Kherson Province it controls, where many towns and villages lie in lowlands below the dam.
Ukraine expects the floodwaters will stop rising by the end of Wednesday after reaching around five metres overnight, presidential deputy chief Oleksiy Kuleba said.
Two thousand people had been evacuated so far from the Ukrainian-controlled part of the flood zone, and the water level had reached its highest level in 17 settlements with a combined population of 16,000 people.
Russia’s TASS state news agency said the water level could remain elevated in places for up to 10 days.
“The sheer magnitude of the catastrophe will only become fully realised in the coming days,” U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths told the Security Council.
Targeting dams in war is explicitly banned by the Geneva Conventions. Neither side has presented public evidence demonstrating who was to blame.
In his nightly address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called 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.
Russia said for its part that a Ukrainian drone had struck a town on the opposite bank during evacuations there and accused the Ukrainian side of continuing shelling despite the flooding.