Ukraine accuses Russia of blowing up Nova Kakhovka dam near Kherson

The Ukrainian army has accused Russia of blowing up the Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River, and called for people living downstream to evacuate in the face of catastrophic flooding.

As aerial footage circulated on social media, showing most of the dam wall washed away and a massive surge of water heading downstream, the army’s Southern Operational Command put up a Facebook post, accusing “Russian occupation troops” of blowing up the hydroelectric dam.

“Currently, the scale of the destruction, the speed and volume of water, and the probable areas of inundation are being determined,” the statement said.

Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of the Kherson region, posted a video to Telegram in which he says that as a result of the damage to the Nova Kahhovka dam, “water will reach a critical level in 5 hours” and that evacuations have begun.

Map of Ukraine

Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior affairs minister also posted a message on Telegram about the reported explosion, accusing Russia of being behind it.

Vladimir Leontiev, the head of the Russian occupied administration of Nova Kakhovka town, on the southern bank of the Dnieper, initially denied that the dam had been blown up, according to Ria Novosti news agency, but he was later reported to confirm there was “damage” and blame it on shelling. The Tass news agency quoted an official source as confirming the dam collapse.

The areas most under threat of flooding are the islands along the course of the Dnieper downstream of Nova Kakhovka and much of the Russian-held left bank in southern Kherson. Earlier modelling of such a disaster suggested Kherson city would not take the brunt of the flood, but the harbour, the docklands and an island in the south of the city are likely to be inundated. It is unclear how many people would lose their homes.

There could be two further dramatic side effects, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant upstream could lose access to water for cooling as the reservoir drains away, and the water supply to Crimea could also be severely affected.

A Moscow-backed official in the Zaporizhzhia region was quoted by a Russian news agency as saying there was no “critical danger” to the plant yet.

The dam, a Soviet power project, was completed in 1956 and was 30 meters high, holding back a vast reservoir of 18m cubic metres of water. It sits about 20 miles upstream from Ukrainian held Kherson, but modelling suggests if it collapsed flooding would affect the islands in the Dnieper River delta and the Russian held southern bank.

Zelenskiy warned last November that Russia was plotting to blow up the two mile structure and that doing so would cause “a large-scale disaster” affecting people living downstream, risking washing away the islands in the Dnipro delta and the homes in the low lying land on the south side of the river.

Blowing up a dam can be considered a war crime, the Geneva conventions say, if it “may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population,” and the effects of a large release of water on people and homes remains for now dangerous but uncertain.

Ukrainian military intelligence also warned in November that Russia had conducted the main mining works as long ago as April 2022, but warned that the floodgates and supports of the dam were further primed in November as Ukraine’s forces closed in on Kherson. “Now everyone in the world must act powerfully and quickly to prevent a new Russian terrorist attack,” Zelenskiy said at the time.

At the time, military intelligence said that “dozens of Ukrainian settlements, including Kherson” could be affected by a breach and that “the scale of the ecological disaster will go far beyond the borders of Ukraine and affect the entire Black Sea region”.

The bridge over the dam was one of only two crossing points over the Dnipro south of Zaporizhzia city before the war. The other, the Antonivksy road bridge at Kherson, was destroyed in November by the retreating Russians, and Russian snipers target anybody lingering on the waterside near the remaining bridge span.