The evacuations continue, the water level rises
Mass evacuations continued in southern Ukraine on Wednesday following the partial destruction of the Kakhovka dam, which has caused flooding in many places along the Dnieper.
The flooding is expected to peak this Wednesday morning and the situation should stabilize in four to five days, Ihor Syrota, director of public hydroelectric company Ukrhydroenergo, announced on Telegram on Tuesday.
“The most difficult situation is in the Korabelny district of the city of Kherson. So far, the water level has risen by 3.5 meters, more than a thousand houses have been flooded,” said the deputy chief of cabinet of the Ukrainian presidency in this city, which was retaken from the Russians by the Ukrainians in November 2022, in a press release. Oleksii Kuleba. The evacuations would continue by bus and train on Wednesday and in the coming days, he said.
“More than 40,000 people are threatened by flood areas. Ukrainian authorities are evacuating more than 17,000 people. Unfortunately, there are more than 25,000 civilians in the Russian-controlled area,” Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin announced on Tuesday. “At this time, 24 towns in Ukraine are flooded,” said Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko.
The authorities deployed by the Russians in the areas they occupied said they had started evacuating the population of three towns and mobilized about fifty buses. Vladimir Leontiev, the Moscow-appointed mayor of Nova Kakhovka, where the dam is located, said his town was flooded and 900 of its residents had been evacuated.
In Geneva, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), a UN humanitarian agency, warned that the destruction of the dam could trigger an environmental disaster and have “serious effects on hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the line”. In Washington, it assessed White House spokesman that this destruction “certainly” took place [fait] many dead,” while clarifying that he “had no definitive conclusion as to what happened.”
Tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land in the Kherson region are at risk of flooding, Ukraine’s Agriculture Ministry wrote in a statement, saying it feared fields in the south of the country would dry up completely next year due to the destruction of the dam and a shortage of drinking water for the population .