KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine on Tuesday accused Russian forces of blowing up a major dam and hydroelectric power station in a part of southern Ukraine that Russia controls, sending water gushing from the breached facility and risking massive flooding. Ukrainian authorities ordered hundreds of thousands of residents downriver to evacuate.
Russian officials countered that the Kakhovka dam was damaged by Ukrainian military strikes in the contested area.
Ukrainian authorities have previously warned that the failure of the Kakhovka dam could unleash 18 million cubic meters (4.8 billion gallons) of water and flood Kherson and dozens of other areas downriver where hundreds of thousands of people live, as well as threatening a nearby Russian-occupied nuclear power plant.
Ukraine’s nuclear operator Energoatom said in a Telegram statement that the blowing up of the dam “could have negative consequences for the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant,” but at the moment situation is “controllable.”
The U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency wrote on Twitter that its experts were closely monitoring the situation at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant upstream, and there was “no immediate nuclear safety risk” at the facility.