WESTERN PERSPECTIVE
War zone villagers flee after massive Ukraine dam destroyed
A torrent of water burst through a massive dam on the Dnipro River that separates Russian and Ukrainian forces in southern Ukraine on Tuesday, flooding a swathe of the war zone, forcing villagers to flee and prompting finger-pointing from both sides.
Ukraine said Russia had committed a deliberate war crime in blowing up the Soviet-era Nova Kakhovka dam, which powered a hydroelectric station. The Kremlin blamed Ukraine, saying it was trying to distract from the launch of a major counteroffensive Moscow says is faltering.
Some Russian-installed officials said the dam had collapsed on its own, while Washington said it was uncertain who was responsible. But Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Robert Wood told reporters it would not make sense for Ukraine to destroy the dam.
Neither side offered immediate public evidence of who was to blame. The Geneva Conventions ban targeting dams in war because of the danger to civilians.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video address that his prosecutors had already approached the International Criminal Court about the dam incident. Earlier, he claimed on Telegram that Russian forces blew up the power plant from inside.
Buses, trains and private vehicles were marshalled to carry people to safety while some people waded in knee-deep water, carrying pets and luggage.
"Residents are sitting on the roofs of their homes waiting to be rescued.... This is a Russian crime against people, nature and life itself," Oleksiy Kuleba, a senior official on Zelenskiy's staff, said on Telegram.
Ukrainian officials reported well over 1,000 people rescued from Kherson city along with residents evacuated from flooded towns and villages.
A Russian-installed official said some 22,000 people in the Kherson region were at risk, RIA news agency said. Zelenskiy wrote on Telegram that 80 settlements were in the flood zone.
"More and more water is coming every hour. It's very dirty," Yevheniya, a woman in Nova Kakhovka on the Russian-controlled bank of the Dnipro, said by telephone.
It was not immediately clear if anyone died but U.S. spokesman John Kirby said it had probably caused "many deaths".
"Our local school and stadium downtown were flooded," Lidia Zubova, 67, told Reuters as she waited for a train out of Ukrainian-controlled Kherson city after abandoning her inundated village of Antonivka. "The road was completely flooded, our bus got stuck."
Ukrainian police released video of an officer carrying an elderly woman to safety and others rescuing dogs in villages being evacuated as the waters rose. Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko accused Russia of shelling areas where people were being evacuated and said two police officers were wounded.
The flooding caused waters to rise by 3.5 meters (11-1/2 feet), Ukrainian official Kuleba said. Flooding would crest on Wednesday then levels would start to fall within three to four days, Ihor Syrota, head of Ukraine's hydroelectric power authority, told the U.S-funded radio station Donbas Realii.
Residents in Russian-controlled Nova Kakhovka told Reuters that some had decided to stay despite being ordered out.
"They say they are ready to shoot without warning," said one man, Hlib, describing encounters with Russian troops.
The Kazkova Dibrova zoo on the Russian-held riverbank was completely flooded and all 300 animals were dead, a representative said via the zoo's Facebook account.
The dam supplies water to a wide area of southern Ukrainian farmland, including the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula, as well as cooling the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
The vast reservoir behind the dam is one of the main geographic features of southern Ukraine, 240 km (150 miles) long and up to 23 km (14 miles) wide.
POISED FOR COUNTEROFFENSIVE
The dam's destruction threatened a new humanitarian disaster in the centre of the war zone and transformed front lines just as Ukraine prepares a long-awaited counteroffensive to drive Russian troops from its territory.
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said his forces had thwarted the first three days of the offensive in battles that had left more than 3,700 Ukrainian soldiers dead or wounded.
Ukraine dismissed the Russian statements as lies but gave no details on the attacks.
Russia has controlled the dam since early in its 15-month-old invasion, although Ukrainian forces recaptured the Dnipro's northern bank last year. Both sides had long accused the other of plotting to destroy the dam.
"Russian terrorists. The destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam only confirms for the whole world that they must be expelled from every corner of Ukrainian land," Zelenskiy wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called the dam's destruction "an outrageous act, which demonstrates once again the brutality of Russia's war in Ukraine".
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the United Nations had no independent information on how the dam was breached, describing it as "another devastating consequence" of Russia's invasion.
The U.N. Security Council was meeting to discuss the dam at the request of both Russia and Ukraine.
Russia cast it as an "act of sabotage carried out by Ukraine", according to the request seen by Reuters.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also blamed "deliberate sabotage by the Ukrainian side".
Earlier, Russian-installed officials had given conflicting accounts. Some said Ukrainian missiles hit the dam overnight, others said it collapsed due to earlier damage.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog said the Zaporizhzhia power plant, upriver on the reservoir's Russian-occupied bank, should have enough water to cool its reactors for "some months" from a separate pond, even as the huge reservoir drains out.
RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE
Russia holds West responsible for dam disaster – UN envoy
Ukraine destroyed the Kakhovka dam in an “unthinkable crime” intended to harm Crimea for choosing Russia in 2014, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN Vassily Nebenzia told the Security Council on Tuesday.
The Russian diplomat brought up US media reports documenting the Ukrainian attacks on the Kakhovka dam in December 2022, using the US-supplied HIMARS rockets.
“Feeling its total impunity and being encouraged by Western sponsors, the Kiev regime decided to carry out this terrorist plot this time,” Nebenzia said. He noted that the Ukrainians had significantly increased the discharge of water from the Dnepropetrovsk hydroelectric power station, leading to even greater flooding downstream, “which indicates that this sabotage was planned in advance.”
The terrorist act was intended to free up Ukrainian forces for the “counter-offensive” currently getting bogged down in Zaporozhye, while inflicting massive humanitarian damage on the population of Kherson Region, Nebenzia said.
Not only did the flood render a dozen towns along the Dnieper River uninhabitable, it has also reduced the levels of water in the North Crimea canal, which supplies water to the Russian peninsula. Ukraine had shut off the canal after Crimea voted to rejoin Russia in a 2014 referendum. It was only reopened last year, when Russian troops took control of the area.
According to Nebenzia, Kiev “once again decided to take revenge on the Crimeans for their choice in favor of Russia and leave the population of Crimea without water.”
Nebenzia called the claims by Ukraine, US and EU officials that Russia was responsible for the dam’s destruction a “well-coordinated disinformation campaign,” in the same vein as previous allegations that Moscow was behind the shelling of its own people at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, or the destruction of Nord Stream gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea.
According to the Russian envoy, Kiev has fully embraced terrorist tactics, from the bombing of the Crimean Bridge to the targeted assassinations of journalists Darya Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky, and the attempt on Zakhar Prilepin – which none of the Western governments said a word to condemn.
“The Kiev regime has good teachers, responsible for destroying the Nord Stream [pipeline] and the deliberate targeting of the Tabqa dam in Syria. The West is used to doing the dirty work with other people’s hands,” the Russian envoy told the Security Council.
“We also do not rule out an attempt at provocation against the Zaporozhye NPP,”Nebenzia said, given that the UN has persistently refused to condemn Ukrainian attacks on the facility, “although it is obvious to everyone which side they are coming from.”
** Ukraine rebuffs Vatican peace attempt
The only end to the conflict that Kiev considers acceptable is the Ukrainian “peace formula,” President Vladimir Zelensky told the Holy See envoy Cardinal Matteo Zuppi in a meeting on Tuesday.
“Ukraine welcomes the willingness of other states and partners to find ways to achieve peace, but since the war is on our territory, the formula for achieving peace can only be Ukrainian,” Zelensky said after meeting the papal emissary in Kiev.
Zelensky added that he discussed the situation in Ukraine and the humanitarian cooperation with the Vatican “within the framework of the Ukrainian peace formula,” and urged the Holy See to join the efforts to pressure Russia.
Zuppi arrived in Ukraine on Monday, in what the Vatican called a “search for paths to a just and lasting peace.” In addition to Zelensky, he met with other Ukrainian officials, including parliamentary commissioner for human rights Dmitry Lubinets.
“The results of these talks, like those with religious representatives as well as the direct experience of the atrocious suffering of the Ukrainian people as a result of the ongoing war, will be brought to the Holy Father’s attention,” the press office of the Holy See said in a statement on Tuesday evening.
This is the second time in two months that Zelensky has declined an offer by Pope Francis to mediate in the conflict with Russia. After his meeting with the pontiff at the Vatican last month, the Ukrainian president told Italian media outlets that Kiev was only interested in its own vision of peace.
“It was an honor for me to meet His Holiness, but he knows my position: the war is in Ukraine and the [peace] plan must be Ukrainian,” Zelensky told talk show host Bruno Vespa.
The “peace formula” in question is a list of Zelensky’s demands first revealed in November 2022, ranging from Russia’s withdrawal from all territories Ukraine claims – including Crimea and the Donbass – payment of reparations, war crimes trials for the Russian leadership, and Ukraine’s membership in NATO.
Moscow has rejected Zelensky’s “peace platform” as delusional. Russia understands that any peace talks will not be held “with Zelensky, who is a puppet in the hands of the West, but directly with his masters,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters last month.
Reuters/RT