Ukraine and the Russian occupation forces continued Wednesday the evacuation of civilians from flooded areas after the destruction the day before in an area under Russian control of the Kakhovka dam (south) on the Dnieper river, which raises fears of a humanitarian disaster and ecological.
Both sides blame each other for the destruction of the dam. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who on Tuesday accused Russia of having mined and blown it up, de facto barring the way to a counter-offensive by his troops in this southern area of ??the country, repeated on Wednesday in an interview with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron that it was a Russian terrorist act”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that it was “a barbaric act” to blame on kyiv.
In Kherson, a city located 70 km downstream from the Kakhovka dam, evacuations continued on Wednesday under the pressure of the nearby river. In the streets of the center, the water comes to the waist and below, on the banks of the Dnieper, it is five meters that it has risen.
“Everything was flooded,” laments Dmitry Melnikov, 46, a father of five. “We have been here since the beginning of the war, we survived the occupation. But now we have no house, nothing.”
In Chornobaivka, the western suburb of Kherson, the furthest from the Dnieper River, a river has formed with the rising waters, several hundred meters wide.
“The water is rising (…) by two centimeters every half hour,” Laura Moussiïane, from the Kherson meteorological center, told AFP.
According to Ukrainian Interior Minister Igor Klymenko, 1,894 people have been evacuated from areas under Ukrainian control, where more than 1,600 rescuers and police have been mobilized. According to him, 30 localities were flooded, including 10 currently under Russian control.
Ukrainian authorities will have to evacuate “more than 17,000” civilians, Attorney General Andriï Kostine said on Tuesday.
On the Russian side, the authorities evacuated “more than 4,000 people” and a state of emergency was declared in the part of the Kherson region controlled by Moscow.
An unknown number of civilians also left the flooded areas on both sides on their own.
French President Emmanuel Macron condemned a “heinous act which endangers populations”, after his telephone interview with Volodymyr Zelensky. He announced the dispatch, “in the next few hours”, of “aid to meet the immediate needs” of Ukraine in the face of this disaster.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced a relief coordination meeting Thursday with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba by videoconference after the “scandalous destruction” of the Kakhovka dam.
London is for its part awaiting, to comment further, “all the available elements”, declared the British Minister for Foreign Affairs, James Cleverly, who had stressed the day before that if necessary such an act would constitute a “crime of war”.
The White House, while indicating that it also lacks information at this stage, and fears “many deaths”, also underlined on Tuesday “that the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure is not authorized by the law of war” .
China expressed its “serious concern”, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggested the creation of an international commission of inquiry.
During a call with his Turkish counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky said on Wednesday that he had mentioned “the humanitarian and environmental consequences” of the destruction of the dam.
Vladimir Putin assured Mr. Erdogan of deploring “a large-scale environmental and humanitarian disaster” in Ukraine after a “barbaric act” which he blames on kyiv
According to Volodymyr Zelensky, who fears “massive environmental damage”, “thousands of animals are trapped in the floods”. More than 150 tons of motor oil have spilled into the river and thousands of hectares of arable land will be flooded, according to kyiv.
The Agriculture Ministry said it had already recorded fish kills in the area, also predicting water shortages for crop irrigation as the Kakhovka reservoir was emptying.
The destruction of this dam built in the 1950s does not entail “no immediate nuclear danger”, however assured the International Agency for Atomic Energy (IAEA).
Moscow and Kiev have also accused each other of having destroyed a pipeline near Massioutovka, a small village controlled by Russian forces in the Kharkiv region (north-eastern Ukraine).
The pipeline, which connects the Russian city of Togliatti, on the banks of the Volga, with Odessa, the most important Ukrainian port on the Black Sea, allowed before the war to Russia to export more than 2.5 million tons of ammonia – a key component of mineral fertilizers – especially to the European Union.
The attack hit equipment “crucial to ensuring food security in the world”, lamented Russian diplomacy on Wednesday. Oleg Synegoubov, the Ukrainian regional governor, had on the contrary accused the Russian army the day before of having bombed the infrastructure.
Its operation had been suspended with the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022 and Moscow demanded its restart.
On the front side, Ukraine again claimed progress near the devastated city of Bakhmout in the east. According to Deputy Defense Minister Ganna Maliar, the Kyiv forces advanced “between 200 meters and 1.1 kilometers”.
07/06/2023 20:51:20 – Kherson (Ukraine) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP