Ukraine Russia war latest news: Putin’s Kakhovka dam attack sends exploding mines floating through Kherson floodwater

The destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam will likely turn Ukraine’s southern fields “into deserts” within the year – sparking a global food security crisis, top Ukrainian officials have warned.

Ukraine’s emergency services are carrying out rescue operations across dozens of towns and villages in the wake of the dam – which is under Russian occupation – unleashing the waters of one of Europe’s largest reservoirs across the war-torn south.

The deluge has destroyed homes, drowned animals, severed clean water supplies and forced thousands of people to evacuate.

Read the full story here:

Hundreds of Ukrainians abandoned their inundated residences as infected flood water spread across southern Ukraine in the aftermath of the Nova Kakhovka dam collapse.

The destruction of a huge hydroelectric dam on the frontlines between Russian and Ukrainian forces has left residents slogging through flooded streets carrying children on their shoulders, dogs in their arms and belongings in plastic bags.

Rescuers also used rubber boats to search areas where the waters reached above head height.

Officials said hundreds of thousands of people remain without access to drinking water after tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land was swamped and at least 500,000 hectares deprived of irrigation turned into “deserts”.

Residents on the Ukrainian-controlled side of the flood zone in the south blamed the bursting of the dam on Russian troops who held it on the eastern bank of the Dnipro.

“They hate us,” riverside villager Oleksandr Reva said.

“They want to destroy a Ukrainian nation and Ukraine itself. And they don’t care by what means because nothing is sacred for them,” he said.

A number of Nato nations could send troops to Ukraine if the besieged country is not given security guarantees at a forthcoming summit, a former secretary-general has warned.

Former Nato chief Anders Rasmussen said that even if such guarantees were not agreed, members of the alliance would not allow the issue of Ukraine’s future Nato membership to be kept off the agenda at the Vilnius summit in July.

The comments come after Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg said Nato would only provide full-fledged security guarantees to full members. Kyiv has long called for Ukraine to be admitted to Nato, but member states have resisted calls out of fears of the possibility of a war with Russia.

Read the full story here:

Fresh high-resolution satellite imagery has shown continuing widespread destruction in southern Ukraine after the Nova Kakhovka dam burst open. Villages and towns downstream from the dam are in the grip of heavy flooding, the aerial images show.

Hundreds of homes, buildings and infrastructure along the Dnipro river remain submerged by the floodwaters in the images taken yesterday evening.

Rishi Sunak said the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine would mark a “new low” in the conflict if Russian forces were found to be responsible.

The prime minister said the immediate priority was the humanitarian response to the catastrophe, which has flooded villages, endangered vital crops and threatened drinking water supplies.

Mr Sunak, speaking to reporters as he travelled to Washington for talks with US president Joe Biden, said if it was an intentional act to blow up the dam it would be “the largest attack on civilian infrastructure” since the start of Vladimir Putin’s war.

Ukraine warned of the danger of floating mines unearthed by flooding and the spread of disease and hazardous chemicals on Wednesday as senior officials inspected damage caused by the collapse of the vast Kakhovka hydro-electric dam.

Visiting the city of Kherson on the Dnipro river that bisects the country, deputy prime minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said that over 80 settlements had been affected in a disaster which Ukraine and Russia blame on each other.

Blaming the dam’s collapse on Russia, Kubrakov said: “They did it in order to free up troops in this direction by flooding this bit of the front line.”

Russia, whose troops seized the dam soon after they invaded in February last year, has said Ukraine sabotaged the dam to distract attention from a counteroffensive it said was “faltering”.

“I can’t even speak now, I can’t collect myself,” said Lyubov Buryi, 67, who was evacuated from Kherson to a hospital on Tuesday with her 40-year-old son Roman.

“I’m of course awfully angry at (the Russians), I can’t even describe it … I don’t know what awaits us, our house seems to be destroyed,” she said.

Regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said the water had reached a depth of 5.34 metres (17.5 ft) in some places of Kherson, though he said the rise had slowed and could peak by the end of Wednesday.

In Kherson, a large city about 60 km (37 miles) downstream from the destroyed dam, residents have set up makeshift embarkation points for dinghies that police, rescue workers and volunteers are now using to get around.

Kherson faces the Russian-controlled eastern bank of the Dnipro, and some residents have come under fire from Russian artillery as they go about their rescue and recovery work. The thud of artillery is heard almost constantly in the distance.

“Water is disturbing mines that were laid earlier, causing them to explode,” Kubrakov, dressed casually in a grey T-shirt, told reporters. As a result of the flooding, chemicals and infectious bacteria were getting into the water, he said.

He said Ukraine had allocated 120 million hryvnias ($3.25 million) allocated to secure the water supply in Mykolaiv, another southern city, and 1.5 billion hryvnias had been set aside to rebuild water mains systems ruined by the flood.

Rishi Sunak has said that he and US President Joe Biden would be discussing the long-term security of Ukraine when the pair meet in Washington.

The Prime Minister, who is due to visit the White House on Thursday, said there was still no “definitive answer” about whether Russia was responsible for destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine but suggested it would fit a “pattern of behaviour” by Vladimir Putin’s forces.

More than 2,700 people are believed to have fled flooded areas on both the Russian and Ukrainian-controlled sides of the river.