On a video, a house floats, carried by the current, its elongated roof protruding from the waves like a strange aquatic monster. On another, two dumbfounded grandmothers discover their neighborhood completely flooded. On a third, the Nova Kakhovka Palace of Culture is half-buried in dirty water. Dozens of photos and videos, posted on social networks by residents, reveal to the world, at eye level, the disaster that occurred Tuesday morning in southern Ukraine.
At dawn, a huge explosion sounded at the level of the hydroelectric power station located on the outskirts of the city of Nova Kakhovka, on the left bank of the Dnieper, in the Kherson region, causing, according to several witnesses, the windows of houses to vibrate. for tens of kilometers around. The blast tore a large opening in the power plant’s dam, pouring torrents of water over entire villages. The plant itself was also damaged.
On site, a Russian official announced Tuesday afternoon that the water level in the reservoir was falling, at a rate of 35 cm per hour. At the same time, Ukrainian authorities claimed that 150 tons of motor oil had spilled into the Dnieper River, that 24 localities were flooded, at least 600 homes were devastated in Nova Kakhovka alone, and that “about a thousand” civilians had been evacuated from the area. Already hostage to Moscow’s war in Ukraine, hundreds of families are now victims of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The impressive facility – the dam alone stands 30 meters high and spans 3.2 kilometers – is in an area currently controlled by the Russians, on the Dnieper River, which flows north to south of the ‘Ukraine. Built in 1956 during the Soviet era, the Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric power station is one of the country’s most important energy facilities.
Holding 18 million cubic meters of water, it generates electricity for more than three million Ukrainians and is a key device in the country’s energy grid. It also supplies water to the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014, as well as the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe (now controlled by Moscow), which also draws water from the reservoir. needed to cool its reactors.
According to the director of the state infrastructure agency, Mustafa Nayyem, the destruction of the dam puts more than 80 localities at risk, and the floods could cause “hundreds of thousands of victims”. “The explosion of the Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant will have devastating consequences, including a water shortage in Crimea that will last for decades, the irreparable disruption of hundreds of thousands of lives, and the risk of drowning for thousands of people. “, lamented Mustafa Nayyem.
Both sides accuse each other of blowing up the dam. Volodymyr Zelensky immediately pointed the finger at “Russian terrorists”. The President’s special ambassador, Anton Korynevych, also condemned, in a speech to the International Criminal Court, the action of a “terrorist state”: Kiev and Moscow found themselves, on that day, in front of international justice in The Hague, in a case brought by Ukraine in 2017 and subsequently accompanied by another request, following the Russian invasion of February 2022, in which Ukraine accuses Russia of plan a genocide.
From Kiev, the adviser to the Ministry of the Interior, Anton Gerashchenko, has also hammered home that the destruction of the dam constitutes “another proof of Russia’s genocidal policy towards the Ukrainians”.
Many members of Ukrainian civil society refer to “ecocide”, a term included in the country’s criminal code since 2001 and which implies a desire to cause major damage to one or more ecosystems. For about a year, Ukraine has been trying to identify acts of “ecocide” committed on its territory by enemy forces.
For their part, the Russian authorities initially denied that the explosion took place, before referring to a sabotage operation by Ukrainian forces aimed at cutting off the influx of water into occupied Crimea and diverting the attention of the world of a probable failure of their counter-offensive, expected for several months. Moscow announced that Russian investigators would conduct an investigation to identify the origin of the explosion.
The many international reactions leave little doubt about the opinion of Western leaders as to who sponsored the disaster. European Council President Charles Michel said Russia should be held to account, calling it a “war crime”. “Russia’s attacks on critical civilian infrastructure have reached an unprecedented level,” said the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, stressing that this act “could constitute a violation of international law”.
“The Nova Kakhovka dam is a particularly strong structure. However, the Ukrainians do not have in their arsenal enough to carry out a strike powerful and precise enough to destroy it in this way”, remarks Colonel Michel Goya, specialist in military questions. “In addition, in view of the images, we can conclude that there was a very vertical explosion, from bottom to top, which suggests that several tons of explosives were placed under the dam, in the middle of the zone occupied by the Russians”, concludes the co-author of The Bear and the Fox. Immediate history of the war in Ukraine.
The strategic site was notoriously a point of concern. Since October, Ukrainian authorities had accused the Russians of mining the facility and feared that Moscow could intentionally damage it.
Tuesday, the experts agreed to consider that the destruction inflicted on the work could not be clogged in the short term. The floods therefore threaten to complicate Ukrainian operations in much of the south, including the passage to the east bank of the Dnieper. The colossal logistical challenge posed by the humanitarian crisis and the damage to the power plant and the dam is as much a blow to kyiv as it is to the morale of the Ukrainians.