More than 2,700 people have been evacuated from flooded areas following the destruction on Tuesday of the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine, Ukrainian and Russian authorities announced today.
“More than 1,450 people have been evacuated,” emergency services spokesman Oleksandre Khorounejii told Ukrainian television, according to French news agency AFP.
The authorities installed by Moscow in the region, cited by Russian agencies, announced that 1,274 people had already been evacuated.
Reporter André Luís Alves is in Kherson and explains that there are thousands of people leaving “with just clothes and some goods”.
The dam is located in the Kherson region, annexed by Russia, but Ukrainian forces control the part located on the right bank of the Dnipro River and Russian troops control the left bank.
Ukraine and Russia accuse each other of destroying part of the dam, which supplies water to the Crimean peninsula, occupied and annexed by Russia in 2014.
Kiev said Russian forces had laid mines on the structure, as alleged by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in October, and Moscow blamed the dam’s destruction on Ukrainian bombing.
British military intelligence services, which have been issuing a daily assessment of the course of the war in Ukraine, have not attributed a cause to the dam’s destruction, referring to a “partial collapse” around 03:00 local time on Tuesday.
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