Soviet-era dam breached in Kherson

MOSCOW/KYIV — A major Soviet-era dam in the Kherson region was breached on Tuesday, unleashing floodwaters in what both Russia and Ukraine said was an intentional attack by the other's forces.

Unverified videos on social media showed water surging through the remains of the dam with bystanders expressing their shock. Water levels raced up by meters in a matter of hours.

The Kremlin on Tuesday said the attack on the Kakhovka dam was "deliberate sabotage" by Kyiv, which wanted to cut off Crimea from water.

Russian news agencies said the dam, now controlled by Russian forces, had been destroyed in shelling while an official said it was a terrorist attack.

The extent of destruction is very serious and restoring it will be comparable to building it from scratch, head of the local administration Vladimir Leontyev said.

The evacuation of areas near the Kakhovka region in southern Ukraine has begun, the governor of the Kherson region said on Tuesday.

"Within five hours the water will reach a critical level," regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Telegram.

Russia's TASS state news agency cited emergency services as saying that some 80 settlements in the area may be affected by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.

Ukraine, however, accused Russia of blowing up the Kakhovka hydroelectric plant. Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that "a global ecological disaster is playing out now".

The dam, 30 meters tall and 3.2 kilometers long and which holds water equal to the Great Salt Lake in the US state of Utah, was built in 1956 on the Dnipro River as part of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant.

It also supplies water to the Crimean Peninsula, and to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which gets cooling water from the reservoir.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said there was no immediate nuclear safety risk to the plant due to the dam failure but that it was monitoring the situation closely. The head of the plant also said there was no current threat to the station.

Russia's state nuclear energy corporation Rosatom said on Tuesday that the breach did not pose a threat to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant for now where it said the situation was being monitored.

Yury Chernichuk, director of the power station, said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that the situation at the nuclear plant was stable.

"At the moment, there are no threats to the safety of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant," he said.

The dam breach came as Ukraine is preparing to launch its long-awaited counteroffensive. Russia said it had thwarted another Ukrainian attack in eastern Donetsk and inflicted heavy losses. It also launched a fresh wave of overnight airstrikes on Kyiv.

Agencies Via Xinhua