Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior advisor to Zelensky, said “a global ecological disaster is playing out now, online, and thousands of animals and ecosystems will be destroyed in the next few hours”,while Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba described the dam's destruction as “probably Europe’s largest technological disaster in decades” and a “ heinous war crime”. Neither side offered immediate evidence proving who was to blame, though both sides agreed that the damage to the station was beyond repair. The Russian-installed mayor of Nova Kakhovka, Vladimir Leontyev, spoke of numerous strikes targeting the Kakhovka hydroelectric plant and destroying its valves. Russian-installed officials gave conflicting accounts, some blaming Ukrainian shelling, others saying the dam had burst on its own due to earlier damage.
Ukraine’s state hydroelectric power generating company, Ukrhydroenergo, said Russia had blown up the station from inside the engine room, writing in a statement: “The station cannot be restored.” > Read more: Live: Ukraine says Russian forces blew up Nova Kakhovka dam Ukraine accused Russia of blowing up the dam from the inside in a deliberate war crime, with Zelensky claiming in a Telegram message that Russian forces “carried out an internal detonation of the structures” of the dam. On Tuesday, footage from what appeared to be a monitoring camera that was circulating on social media purported to show a flash, explosion and breakage of the dam. Ukraine and Russia have previously accused each other of targeting the dam, and last October Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky predicted that Russia would destroy it in order to cause a flood and halt Ukraine’s counteroffensive in Kherson province.
The dam is 30 metres tall and hundreds of metres wide, holding back a huge reservoir of water, roughly equivalent to the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
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