Kakhovka dam attack will have ‘same effect’ as Chernobyl, expert warns – latest news

Environmental experts have warned that the Nova Kakhovka dam collapse will have long-term effects akin to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Ukraine says Russia blew up the dam, most likely as an attempt to slow down Kyiv’s military counteroffensive. Russia has denied responsibility.

Maksym Soroka, an environmental safety expert at the Dovkola Network NGO, told FT.com that she compares the massive attack with “the Chernobyl disaster”.

“Yes, the consequences are different, but the long-term effect on the population and the territory is the same,” she said.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said it was impossible to predict how many people would die in Russian-occupied areas due to the flooding, urging a “clear and rapid reaction from the world” to support victims.

At least three people have died in floods in southern Ukraine’s Kherson, local media reports have said in the first such confirmation of casualties from the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam.

Three people drowned in the Kherson region, said Yevhen Ryshchuk, the exiled mayor of Russia-occupied Oleshky, reported The Kyiv Independent.

More than 80 settlements had been affected by the disaster, deputy prime minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said after his visit to the downstream regions. He added that the flooding had released chemicals and infectious bacteria into the water.

Heavy fighting continues along multiple sectors of the frontline in Ukraine and in most areas, the Ukrainian forces hold the initiative amid a highly complex operational picture, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) said today.

“Russian forces are likely still being ordered to return to the offensive as soon as possible: Chechen units have led an unsuccessful attempt to take the town of Marivka, near Donetsk city, where the front line has changed little since 2015,” the ministry said in its latest intelligence update.

It added that through yesterday, flood levels continued to rise in the lower Dnipro, following the collapse of the Kakhovka Dam.

However, the water level will likely start to recede today.

Shelling has complicated some attempts to evacuate displaced civilians from inundated areas, the ministry said.

The World Bank will conduct a rapid assessment of damage and needs to help Ukraine after Tuesday’s destruction of a huge hydroelectric dam on the frontline between Russian and Ukrainian forces, a top bank official said.

The destruction of the Novo Kakhovka dam had “many very serious consequences for essential service delivery and the broader environment”, said Anna Bjerde, the World Bank’s managing director for operations.

Ms Bjerde said the new damage assessment would build on the bank’s previous analysis of damage to Ukraine‘s infrastructure and buildings, which estimated that it would cost $411bn (£329bn) to rebuild Ukraine‘s economy after Russia’s invasion.

Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shmyhal said he spoke with Ms Bjerde about the impact of the dam’s collapse.

Officials at the International Monetary Fund also said the agency is “very concerned” about the social, economic and environmental impact from the destruction of the dam.

Volodymyr Zelensky has said the situation in the Russia-occupied part of Kherson region after the collapse of Nova Kakhovka dam is “absolutely catastrophic”.

“The occupiers simply abandoned people in these terrible conditions. Without rescue, without water, just on the rooftops in flooded communities. And this is another deliberate crime of Russia: after the terrorist state has caused a disaster, it also maximises the damage from it,” he said today.

Warning that many people in the affected parts “may die without rescue, drinking water, food and medical care”, Mr Zelensky said the Ukrainian military and special services are “rescuing people as much as it is possible, despite the shelling”.

“We need international organisations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, to immediately join the rescue operation and help people in the occupied part of Kherson region. Each person who dies there is a verdict on the existing international architecture and international organisations that have forgotten how to save lives,” said Mr Zelensky, calling on the international humanitarian organisations to help.

The destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam will likely turn Ukraine’s southern fields “into deserts” within the year – sparking a global food security crisis, top Ukrainian officials have warned.

Ukraine’s emergency services are carrying out rescue operations across dozens of towns and villages in the wake of the dam – which is under Russian occupation – unleashing the waters of one of Europe’s largest reservoirs across the war-torn south.

The deluge has destroyed homes, drowned animals, severed clean water supplies and forced thousands of people to evacuate.

Read the full story here:

Hundreds of Ukrainians abandoned their inundated residences as infected flood water spread across southern Ukraine in the aftermath of the Nova Kakhovka dam collapse.

The destruction of a huge hydroelectric dam on the frontlines between Russian and Ukrainian forces has left residents slogging through flooded streets carrying children on their shoulders, dogs in their arms and belongings in plastic bags.

Rescuers also used rubber boats to search areas where the waters reached above head height.

Officials said hundreds of thousands of people remain without access to drinking water after tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land was swamped and at least 500,000 hectares deprived of irrigation turned into “deserts”.

Residents on the Ukrainian-controlled side of the flood zone in the south blamed the bursting of the dam on Russian troops who held it on the eastern bank of the Dnipro.

“They hate us,” riverside villager Oleksandr Reva said.

“They want to destroy a Ukrainian nation and Ukraine itself. And they don’t care by what means because nothing is sacred for them,” he said.

A number of Nato nations could send troops to Ukraine if the besieged country is not given security guarantees at a forthcoming summit, a former secretary-general has warned.

Former Nato chief Anders Rasmussen said that even if such guarantees were not agreed, members of the alliance would not allow the issue of Ukraine’s future Nato membership to be kept off the agenda at the Vilnius summit in July.

The comments come after Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg said Nato would only provide full-fledged security guarantees to full members. Kyiv has long called for Ukraine to be admitted to Nato, but member states have resisted calls out of fears of the possibility of a war with Russia.

Read the full story here:

Fresh high-resolution satellite imagery has shown continuing widespread destruction in southern Ukraine after the Nova Kakhovka dam burst open. Villages and towns downstream from the dam are in the grip of heavy flooding, the aerial images show.

Hundreds of homes, buildings and infrastructure along the Dnipro river remain submerged by the floodwaters in the images taken yesterday evening.

Rishi Sunak said the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine would mark a “new low” in the conflict if Russian forces were found to be responsible.

The prime minister said the immediate priority was the humanitarian response to the catastrophe, which has flooded villages, endangered vital crops and threatened drinking water supplies.

Mr Sunak, speaking to reporters as he travelled to Washington for talks with US president Joe Biden, said if it was an intentional act to blow up the dam it would be “the largest attack on civilian infrastructure” since the start of Vladimir Putin’s war.