Ukraine’s Zelenskyy says dam blast will not stop military plans

World
By William

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called the collapse of the Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine an act of “massive environmental destruction” and said the attack on such critical infrastructure undermines Ukraine’s plans to retake territory from the occupying Russian troops will not change.

Zelenskyy described the explosion that destroyed the dam as a deliberate and chaotic act by Russia and on Tuesday said the dam was blown up in an attempt to “use the flood as a weapon” to hinder Ukrainian forces.

In his nightly address to the nation, Zelensky said Moscow resigned itself to losing control of Russia-annexed Crimea and had therefore destroyed the region’s water supply.

“The fact that Russia has deliberately destroyed the Kakhovka reservoir, which is particularly crucial for Crimea’s water supply, indicates that the Russian occupiers have already realized that they will also have to flee Crimea,” he said.

“We will still liberate all our land,” Zelensky said, adding that blowing up the dam would not prevent Russian defeat, but would add to the post-war recovery costs that Moscow will one day have to pay to Ukraine.

The Kremlin blamed Ukraine for the dam’s collapse on Tuesday, saying Kiev destroyed the site to distract from the faltering launch of the counter-offensive that had already blunted Moscow.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said his troops thwarted the first three days of the Ukrainian counter-offensive in battles that killed or injured thousands of Ukrainian soldiers. The decision to destroy the dam was to slow down attacking Russian forces, he said.

Neither Moscow nor Kiev have provided evidence for their claims of the dam’s destruction.

The collapse of the dam is another humanitarian catastrophe in the center of a war zone and Ukraine is preparing for its long-awaited counter-offensive.

‘Serious and far-reaching consequences’

Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford, reporting from the dam’s reservoir in Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region, said the dam had supplied electricity and drinking water to hundreds of thousands of people in Ukraine before its destruction.

“The locals we have spoken to here say… the water level has dropped somewhere between a meter and two meters today, and we expect the level to continue falling over the next few hours and days and based on that one can only imagine the kind of devastating effect for it to have on affected areas south of the dam,” Stratford said.

Ihor Syrota, head of Ukraine’s hydroelectric power station, told the United States-funded radio station Donbas Realii that flooding had raised water levels by 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) and Ukrainian officials believe flood waters will rise on Wednesday, after which the levels would rise. begin to fall within three to four days.

The floods have already inundated towns and cities around the city of Kherson, and Russian officials warned that the main canal that supplies the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula is receiving drastic cuts in water.

Ukrainian authorities said 17,000 people were evacuated from Ukrainian-held territory and a total of 24 villages were flooded.

“More than 40,000 people are at risk of being flooded,” said Ukrainian Attorney General Andriy Kostin, adding that another 25,000 people should be evacuated in the most critical risk areas on the Russian-occupied side of the Dnipro River.

Vladimir Leontyev, the Moscow-installed mayor of Nova Kakhovka, where the dam is located, said the city was flooded and hundreds of people had been evacuated.

The United Nations said at least 16,000 people have already lost their homes and efforts are underway to provide clean water, money and legal and emotional support to those affected. People on the Ukrainian-controlled side of the river were evacuated by ferries to cities such as Mykolaiv and Odessa in the west.

UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths told the Security Council on Tuesday that the full “magnitude of the catastrophe” will only be fully realized in the coming days.

“But it is already clear that it will have serious and far-reaching consequences for thousands of people in southern Ukraine – on both sides of the frontline – through the loss of homes, food, safe water and livelihoods,” Griffiths said.

Russia and Ukraine exchanged blame for the disaster at an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Tuesday.

James Bays, Al Jazeera’s diplomatic editor who reports from UN headquarters in New York, said the Russian and Ukrainian ambassadors gave “completely different accounts of what happened to the dam” at the council meeting.

The Russian ambassador pointed out that there had been previous threats to the dam from Ukraine, Bays said, and Ukraine made it clear that the dam was in Russian-controlled territory and that only mining could have destroyed the dam, not an attack from afar .

“Those are the clear positions of the two sides and what you really need is someone to properly investigate which of these two completely different stories is true. I don’t think that will happen anytime soon,” Bays said, noting that the dam remains a military frontline.

Ukraine’s interior minister said on Tuesday that Russia shelled areas from which people were being evacuated from the dam’s floodwaters and that two police officers had been injured.

Ben Barry, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said flooding from the dam would benefit Moscow in the near term.

“When you consider that Russia is on the strategic defensive and Ukraine is on the strategic offensive, it’s definitely an advantage for Russia in the short term,” Barry said.

“It will help the Russians until the water recedes because it will be harder for Ukraine to attack river crossings,” he said.

Flood waters flooding the region will also prevent the use of heavy weapons such as tanks for at least a month, said Maciej Matysiak, a security expert at the Stratpoints Foundation and former deputy chief of Polish military counterintelligence.

“(This) creates a very good defensive position for Russians expecting Ukrainian offensive activity,” Matysiak said.

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