Russian troops were seen being swept away by raging floodwaters and running for their lives after the Nova Khakovka dam collapsed, according to a Ukrainian officer.
Capt. Andrei Pidlisnyi told CNN that at the time of the dam breach early Tuesday, “no one on the Russian side was able to get away. All the regiments the Russians had on that side were flooded.”
The officer suggested that Vladimir Putin’s soldiers may not have received an advance warning of what he claimed to be a Russian attack.
According to Pidlisnyi, the flooding killed or injured many enemy troops stationed on the east bank of the Dnipro River, which is under Russian control.
Russia and Ukraine blamed each other for the destruction of the dam, with the Kremlin calling it an act of “sabotage by the Kyiv regime,” and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky leveling an accusation of “ecocide” — or ecological genocide — at Moscow.
“In our opinion, this is a crime, the Prosecutor General’s Office has already registered it. It will have evidence,” Zelensky said in an interview with Ukrainian media. “I think that there should be criminal liability… International institutions, including the International Criminal Court, should react.”
In his nightly address to the nation Tuesday, Zelensky referred to a report by Ukrainian intelligence last fall that claimed occupying Russian troops had mined the dam to ”blackmail the world” and ultimately “use the flood as a weapon.”
It was not immediately clear whether the massive dam separating the Russian and Ukrainian forces in the Kherson region was attacked by someone, or whether the collapse was the result of structural damage.
The Ukrainian army captain told CNN he believed the Russians had deliberately targeted the reservoir to thwart Kyiv’s long-awaited counteroffensive.
“The enemy blew up the Kakhovka Hydro Power Plant in order to raise the water level to flood the approaches and the left bank of the Dnipro River, as well as the settlements located there. And to make it impossible for the Ukrainian armed forces to advance in the future,” Pidlisnyi claimed.
The captain, whose unit was stationed on the west bank of the river, said he and his comrades watched the Russian-occupied east bank get flooded.
“You need to understand that the enemy’s positions are not only trenches but also ordinary civilian houses where they lived,” he added.
In a phone conversation with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan Wednesday, Putin called the destruction of the dam an “environmental and humanitarian catastrophe,” which he attributed to “Kyiv’s barbaric act”.
Erdogan told Russia’s leader that a comprehensive investigation was needed into the incident.
He said that an international commission that includes the UN and Turkey could lead the inquest.
Washington said it was still gathering evidence about who was to blame for the disaster, but that Ukraine would have had no reason to inflict such devastation on its own territory by.
“Why would Ukraine do this to its own territory and people, flood its land, force tens of thousands of people to leave their homes — it doesn’t make sense,” Deputy US Ambassador to the United Nations Robert Wood told reporters.
Ukraine said the flood from the breach would leave hundreds of thousands of people without access to drinking water, swamp tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land and turn more into deserts.
The waters of the huge reservoir behind the Khakovka dam irrigated large swaths of farmland and were used to cool the reactors of the Zaporozhzhia nuclear power plant upstream.
Presidential deputy chief Oleksiy Kuleba said the floodwaters were expected to stop rising by the end of Wednesday after reaching more than 16 feet overnight.
Two thousand people had been evacuated so far from the Ukrainian-controlled part of the flood zone, and the water level had reached its highest level in 17 settlements with a combined population of 16,000 people.
Meanwhile, Russia imposed a state of emergency in the parts of Kherson province it controls.
Russia’s state-controlled TASS news agency reported that the water level could remain elevated in places for up to 10 days.
“The sheer magnitude of the catastrophe will only become fully realized in the coming days,” UN aid chief Martin Griffiths told the Security Council.
With Post wires
