“Ecocide”, “one of the worst environmental disasters”, charges kyiv after destruction of Kakhovka dam

Mass evacuations continued in southern Ukraine on Wednesday after the partial destruction of the Khakovka dam, which caused flooding in many areas along the Dnieper.

The peak of flooding is expected on Wednesday morning, and the situation will stabilize in four to five days, Ihor Sirota, director of public hydropower company Ugrihydronergo, announced on Tuesday. telegram.

“The situation is very difficult in the Korapelni district of Kherson city. So far, the water level has risen by 3.5 meters and more than a thousand houses have been flooded.In the city, which was captured by the Ukrainians from the Russians in November 2022, Oleksiy Kuleba, deputy head of the Ukrainian presidency, said in a press release. Evacuation by bus and train will continue on Wednesday and in the coming days, he said.

“More than 40,000 people are at risk of flooding. Ukrainian authorities have evacuated more than 17,000 people. Unfortunately, more than 25,000 civilians remain in Russian-controlled territory.Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin announced on Tuesday. “At this stage, twenty-four places in Ukraine are flooded”Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said.

Authorities established by the Russians in the areas they occupied said they had mobilized fifty buses and begun evacuating the population of the three areas. Vladimir Leontiev, the Moscow-appointed mayor of Nova Khakovka, where the dam is located, said his town was under water and 900 of its residents had been evacuated.

In Geneva, the UN humanitarian agency, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), warned that destroying the dam could cause an environmental disaster. “Having a severe impact on hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the front line”. In Washington, a White House spokesman assessed the destruction “Of course [fait] too many deaths” When specifying no “There is no definitive conclusion as to what happened.”.

Tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land in the Kherson region are at risk of flooding, the Ukrainian agriculture ministry wrote in a statement, fearing that entire fields in the southern country could dry up next year due to the destruction of the dam. Lack of drinking water for people.