The collapse of a major dam in southern Ukraine created what President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called “the largest man-made environmental disaster in Europe in decades" that the U.N. nuclear agency was closely monitoring.
Zelenskyy said Russian forces blew up the Kakhovka dam and hydropower station along the Dnieper River on Tuesday in a Russian-controlled area of Ukraine, causing dozens of towns to suffer flooding and one of the world's largest reservoirs to start emptying. Russia blamed the catastrophe on the Ukrainian military.
The hydropower station was "completely destroyed" by an explosion within the engine room and was beyond the point of repair, while the water level in the Kakhovka Reservoir was "rapidly decreasing," Ukraine’s hydropower company Ukrhydroenerho said. The United Nations Security Council held an urgent meeting on the disaster's far-reaching environmental and humanitarian dimensions.
The dam, built in 1956, is 30 meters tall and 3.2 kilometers long. It has supplied water to large areas of southeastern Ukraine and the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula. The dam’s reservoir, with about 18 million cubic meters of water, also provided water for cooling six reactors and for spent fuel and emergency diesel generators at the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant, Europe's largest such facility.
"This is a terrorist act against Ukrainian critical infrastructure that aims at causing as many civilian casualties and as much destruction as possible," said Ukraine's U.N. Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya, whose delegation requested the meeting.
"By resorting to scorched earth tactics, or, in this case, to flooded earth tactics," he said, "the Russian occupiers have effectively recognized that the captured territory does not belong to them and they are not able to hold these lands."
Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said Ukraine conducted a test strike on the dam with a HIMARS launcher to see if the water could be raised high enough to prevent Russian military crossings without flooding nearby villages.
"We have warned the international community and U.N. leadership about this threat," he said. "We regret that our calls to the [U.N.] secretary-general to do everything possible to prevent this horrifying crime were not duly heeded."
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said the world body could not independently determine what caused the dam blast "but one thing is clear: this is another devastating consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine."
"We are seeing the effects in the city of Kherson, the town of Nova Kakhovka and 80 other towns and villages along the Dnieper River," Guterres told reporters.
'Grave and far-reaching consequences'
At least 16,000 people have already lost their homes, Guterres said, and thousands more were at risk of losing safe, clean drinking water supplies due to the massive flooding that prompted large-scale evacuations, destruction of newly planted crops and other environmental devastation.
The dam blast also created "added threats to the highly threatened Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant," he said. "Today’s tragedy is yet another example of the horrific price of war on people. The floodgates of suffering have been overflowing for more than a year. That must stop. Attacks against civilians and critical civilian infrastructure must stop. We must act to ensure accountability and respect for international humanitarian law."
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency also warned that the dam blast further threatened the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant, which already faced serious risks of catastrophe in case of power outages.
The power is needed to cool the plant's reactor fuel and prevent a meltdown. Already, the plant has had to run on emergency diesel generators due to missile strikes.
The severe damage to the dam led to "a significant reduction in the level of the reservoir used to supply cooling water " to the plant, IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi told the agency's board of governors in Vienna.
"Absence of cooling water in the essential cooling water systems for an extended period of time would cause fuel melt and inoperability of the emergency diesel generators," he said. "However, our current assessment is that there is no immediate risk to the safety of the plant."
The head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the terrifying pictures of the catastrophe unfolding in Kherson shows the destruction of the dam "is possibly the most significant incident of damage to civilian infrastructure since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine."
"The sheer magnitude of the catastrophe will only become fully realized in the coming days," said OCHA's chief, Martin Griffiths, "but it is already clear that it will have grave and far-reaching consequences for thousands of people in southern Ukraine – on both sides of the front line – through the loss of homes, food, safe water and livelihoods."
This story has been updated with additional details.
