New Delhi: As Ukraine and Russia continue to trade blame for the collapse of Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam Tuesday, the reasons behind the damage remains unclear. According to reports, however, experts have said a deliberate explosion inside the dam was the most likely cause behind its collapse.
The Soviet-era dam in Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region of Ukraine, currently under Russian occupation, was damaged in an explosion Tuesday. The collapse of the dam led to the flooding of dozens of towns and villages, and forced thousands to leave their homes.
Ukrainian military intelligence has been quoted as saying that an explosion occurred at the Kakhovka dam at 2:50 am local time Tuesday (5:20 am IST Tuesday) which first ruptured the middle of the dam wall, next to the adjoining power plant. While initially the ends of the wall initially remained intact, it eventually began to collapse.
The Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power plant, located on the Dnipro River in Kherson in the Russia-controlled part of southern Ukraine, is the largest reservoir in the country in terms of volume. With a capacity of 18 cubic km of water, it feeds the north Crimea canal which carries drinking water to Russia-occupied Crimea. It provides water to farmers and residents, as well as to the cooling system in the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
According to a report Wednesday, Maxar satellite imagery showed that the road bridge that ran across the dam was damaged between 1-2 June, days before the dam collapsed.
Images from 28 May show the road bridge to be intact, while images from 5 June show a section of the bridge to be missing. While the report could not verify if these damages played a role in the dam’s eventual collapse, the images highlight that the dam was indeed facing intrusion or an attack.
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War of words
While Ukraine has blamed Russian occupying forces, which have controlled the dam and Kherson since the invasion last year, Russia has called the collapse “deliberate sabotage undertaken by Kyiv”.
During an emergency session of the United Nations Wednesday, Russian ambassador to the United Nations (UN), Vasily Nebenzya, claimed that Kyiv orchestrated this “terrorist plan” as a part of its counteroffensive measures “with the encouragement of its Western backers”.
Addressing the UN Security Council, Nebenzya reportedly said, “The West is used to doing the dirty work with other people’s hands.” Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has also been quoted in the media as saying that destroying the dam was Ukraine’s attempt to slow down Russian forces who have been thwarting Russian counter-offensive measures.
Ukraine’s ambassador to the UN, Sergiy Kyslytsya, has meanwhile reportedly accused Moscow of detonating “a bomb of mass environmental destruction” causing the flooding. Calling the incident an “act of ecological and technological terrorism”, he observed that this was “yet another example of Russia’s genocide against Ukrainians”.
He also countered Russian claims by noting that the dam was out of Ukrainian reach and that it was “physically impossible” to have caused damage of this severity with shelling.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his nightly address has claimed the attack was Moscow’s acceptance of losing control of Crimea. Zelenskyy also accused Russia of using “the flood as a weapon” to deter Ukrainian counteroffensive measures as well as harming civilians.
“The fact that Russia deliberately destroyed the Kakhovka reservoir, which is critically important, for providing water to Crimea, indicates that the Russian occupiers have already realised that they will have to flee Crimea as well,” he said.
The impact
Since the dam began to collapse Tuesday, mass evacuations have been underway in 10 riverside settlements and districts of Kherson city. About 42,000 people living along the Dnipro river are reportedly at risk of flooding, including 17,000 people in Ukraine-controlled territory west of the Dnipro River and 25,000 on the Russia-controlled east.
A perusal of maps of the area and available visuals, would suggest that Russian-controlled areas in the south of the region, consisting of marshes, low-lying islands, are likely to be worse hit by the flooding than the plain land above the Kherson city that overlooks the Dnipro river.
Oleksandr Prokudin, the Ukraine-appointed head of the Kherson region military administration has been quoted in the media as saying that almost 16,000 people on the west bank of Kherson region are in a “critical zone”, with thousands already evacuated from the Kyiv-held parts of Kherson.
He also reportedly stated that about 1,335 houses on the west bank of the Dnipro River, near the dam already “appear to be underwater”.
Apart from humanitarian and environmental damage, concerns have also been raised about the safe operation of Europe’s largest nuclear plant, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine, which uses water from the dam for its cooling system. While the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has observed that there appears to be “no immediate nuclear safety risk” for the plant, Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister Andrij Melnyk has called the breach “the worst environmental disaster in Europe since Chernobyl [the 1986 nuclear tragedy]”.
Yuri Sak, an adviser to Ukraine’s ministry of defence said Wednesday that phone intercepts suggest Russia wants to target more dams, noting that 150 tonnes of engine oil have already spilled into the Dnipro river, with Ukraine branding the incident as an “ecocide”.
“They’re [Russia] calling to blow up more dams on the Dnipro river,” he said.
Many world leaders have called the attack a “war crime”, as Geneva Conventions ban attacks on dams which may affect civilian lives. Article 56 of the additional protocols to the Geneva Conventions, adopted in August 1977, bans attacks on “works or installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations”, even if they are military structures.
NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg has reportedly termed the collapse of the dam an “outrageous act, demonstrating once again the brutality of Russia’s war”, while European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borell in a joint statement with Janez Lenarčič, European Commissioner for crisis management, called “attacks on critical civilian infrastructure” a “war crime”.
Many other European leaders, from Spain, Croatia, Denmark and elsewhere, have also condemned the attack.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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