As floodwaters began to recede in the city of Kherson for the first time since the Kakhovka dam was destroyed, Ukrainian officials on Friday warned that coastal communities across southern Ukraine face new dangers. when explosive devices wash up on beaches and debris threatens to trigger sea mines. close to shore.
Natalia Humeniuk, a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian military’s Southern Command, said that even seemingly innocuous materials washed ashore as far away as Odesa could contain explosive devices.
Kherson is located at the mouth of the Dnipro River, where the dam was destroyed and the last major city before the river emptied into the Black Sea. As floodwaters swept westward, like ink spilled on paper, they carried debris to cities and towns along the coast, including Odesa, a coastal city more than 100 miles from the dam, where a demolition crew detonated a landmine that washed ashore.
Odesa residents also reported roofs, wall fragments, dead animals and even gravestones among the debris drifting into the city.
Mr. Humeniuk, speaking at a news conference on Friday, said the humanitarian relief effort was being complicated by Russian forces directly targeting evacuation points in the flooded southern region. Kherson. She said that 20 people were wounded on Thursday in a series of attacks and that Russian forces continued their bombardment into the night, dropping four bombs that hovered over the flooded village of Beryslav.
Local officials said at least two people were killed in attacks in the Kherson area on Thursday.
Emergency workers have enough aid supplies for the moment, she said, so Ukraine is limiting the number of humanitarian groups allowed into the area because the risk of injury from shelling could increase. Taxes on medical services are inherently stressful.
President Volodymyr Zelensky called the shelling of evacuation points, including the one he visited on Thursday in Kherson, “a manifestation of a crime for which there is perhaps no terrorist in the world, except for terrorists in Russia, did.”
Zelensky also called on international aid organizations to ask Moscow to allow them to provide humanitarian assistance in flooded areas under the control of Russian forces. About 2,200 people have been evacuated from areas controlled by Ukraine, but little is known about conditions in the Russian-occupied territory, according to UN officials.
Vladimir SaldoThe head of the Kremlin-appointed Kherson region, said on Friday that about 5,800 people had been rescued, although that number could not be independently verified because Russia does not allow observers independence into the occupied areas.
The demolition of the Russian-controlled dam early Tuesday morning released streams of water from a reservoir about the same volume as the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and it continued to dry up on Friday. The dam is the last of a series of six dams running along the Dnipro River, starting just outside Kyiv.
Officials at Ukrhydroenergo, the company that controlled the dam before Russian forces seized it in the first weeks of an all-out invasion last year, say they are storing water in reservoirs farther up resources on Dnipro to help secure supplies for drinking water, agriculture and other operations. demand.
Even as floodwaters near the dam begin to recede – dropping by about half a foot in Kherson on Friday morning – they are still rising further downstream. Experts say it will still be some time before the full extent of the devastation is revealed.
But Ukrainian environmental officials say the vast estuary ecosystem where the Dnipro and Black Sea rivers meet has been devastated. Ruslan Strilets, Ukraine’s minister of environmental protection and natural resources, said it was “virtually impossible to restore these ecosystems to their original form created by nature”.
“And there is no amount of money in the world that will return our unique nature to us,” he said.
Victoria Kim And Nick Cumming-Bruce contribution report.
