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Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called the collapse of the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine an act of “mass environmental destruction” and said the attack on such critical infrastructure would not alter Ukraine’s plans to retake territory from occupying Russian forces. Zelenskyy said Moscow was resigned to losing control of Russian-annexed Crimea and had destroyed the region’s water supply.
The Kremlin blamed Ukraine for the dam’s collapse on Tuesday, saying Kyiv had destroyed the site to distract from the faltering launch of its counteroffensive that Moscow had already blunted. The failure presents a new humanitarian disaster in the centre of a war zone as Ukraine prepares for its long-awaited counterattack. The dam’s reservoir in Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region, before its destruction, the dam had provided electricity and drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people in Ukraine.
The water level of the Dnipro River in Ukraine has dropped by between a metre and two metres, and the flooding has already submerged villages and towns around the city of Kherson. Russian officials warned that the central canal supplying water to the Russian-annexed Crimea peninsula receives drastically less water.
At least 16,000 people have already lost their homes, and efforts are underway to provide clean water, money, and legal and emotional support to those affected. Russia and Ukraine traded blame for the disaster at an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Tuesday. The Russian and Ukrainian ambassadors at the council meeting gave “completely different accounts of what’s happened” to the dam.
The Russian ambassador made the point that there had been previous threats to the dam by Ukraine. In contrast, Ukraine pointed out that the dam was situated in territory controlled by Russian forces and that only mining it could have destroyed it, not an attack from afar.
Ukraine’s interior minister said that Russia was shelling areas where people were being evacuated from the dam’s flood waters and that two police officers had been wounded. Ben Barry, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said flooding from the dam would be to Moscow’s advantage in the short term, making it more difficult for Ukraine to do assault river crossings. Maciej Matysiak, a security expert at the Stratpoints Foundation and ex-deputy chief of Polish military counter-intelligence, said this creates an excellent defending position for Russians who expect Ukrainian offensive activity.
