Ukraine Blames Russia for Dam Blast As War Intensifies

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(Bloomberg) — Ukraine said Russian forces blew up a giant dam in the south of the country, unleashing a torrent of water on the battlefield separating its two armies as Kiev intensifies the fight to retake occupied territory.

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The explosion at the Kakhovska hydroelectric power station is causing a rise in water levels that threatens 10 villages on the western bank of the Dnipro and puts a part of the city of Kherson at risk, the Ukrainian Interior Ministry said on Telegram, urging people to prepare. for evacuation.

While crops are not directly at risk, wheat prices rose as much as 3% on Tuesday on supply concerns, extending their rise from a 30-month low last week. The destruction of the dam “looks like a huge escalation with dire consequences and high risk for headlines,” Andrey Sizov, managing director of agricultural consultancy SovEcon, said in a tweet.

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— Volodymyr Zelensky (@ZelenskyyUa) June 6, 2023

Russia has not officially commented on the incident as of yet. Fighting is intensifying along the front lines as Kiev forces prepare for their counter-offensive in eastern and southern Ukraine. Russian troops are entrenched on the opposite side of the Dnipro river from the city of Kherson after they were forced to withdraw in November from the regional capital that was the only one occupied by President Vladimir Putin's army shortly after the February invasion. of 2022.

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Ukraine has repeatedly warned in the past year that Russia could try to blow up the dam to try to stop its advance. Moscow sought to "create insurmountable obstacles" for Ukraine's military with the floods, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine's presidential office, said on Twitter. "Colossal damage will be done to the environment."

Russia carried out another wave of missile attacks on Ukraine overnight, firing 35 cruise missiles that were intercepted by air defences, the Ukrainian General Staff reported on Facebook. Ukraine carried out 19 airstrikes against Russian troop formations, hitting command posts, an ammunition depot and artillery positions, it said.

Separately, Ukraine reported that an ammonia pipeline was damaged by Russian shelling in the Kharkiv region, near the border between the countries. Russia views the pipeline, which was shut down during the war, as a key issue in talks about maintaining grain shipments through the Black Sea corridor.

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President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called an urgent meeting of Ukraine's national security and defense council to discuss the damage to the dam. He blamed the attack on Russia, saying on Telegram that the destruction of the dam "only confirms for the whole world that they must be expelled from all corners of the Ukrainian land."

More than 80 settlements and the city of Kherson lie within the flood zone "which could cause hundreds of thousands of victims," ​​Ukraine's Deputy Infrastructure Minister Mustafa Nayyem said on Twitter. The hydroelectric plant, which Russia has decoupled from Ukraine's grid, provides electricity to more than 3 million people and is a "crucial part of the country's energy infrastructure," he said.

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Eight villages and a district of Kherson were fully or partially flooded in the early morning and some 16,000 people in the region are in a "critical zone," Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said in a video on his Telegram channel. Nearly 750 people have so far been evacuated from the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Kherson region, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said on Telegram.

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, which has been occupied by Russian forces for more than a year, uses water from the Kakhovska reservoir to cool its reactors. The situation at the plant is now under control and the cooling reservoir is full, Ukraine's nuclear power operator Energoatom said on Telegram.

There is no risk of flooding in Crimea as a result of the dam damage, said Sergei Aksyonov, who heads the Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, the Interfax news service reported. Although potable water tanks are 80% full, the flow to the canal that supplies supplies to the region may slow and work is underway to minimize losses, he said.

—With the help of Daryna Krasnolutska.

(Updates with missile strikes in fifth paragraph, details throughout)