KHERSON, Ukraine
(Reuters) -- Ukrainians abandoned inundated homes as floodwaters crested across a swathe of the south on Wednesday after the destruction of a vast hydro-electric dam on the front line between Russian and Ukrainian forces that each blamed on the other.
Residents waded through flooded streets carrying children on their shoulders, dogs in their arms and belongings in plastic bags while rescuers used rubber boats to search areas where the waters reached above head height.
Ukraine said the flood would leave hundreds of thousands of people without access to drinking water, swamp tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land and turn at least 500,000 hectares deprived of irrigation into “deserts”.
The Nova Kakhovka dam disaster coincides with a looming, long-vaunted counteroffensive by Ukrainian forces against Russia’s invasion, seen as the next major phase of the war. The sides traded blame for continued shelling across the flood zone and warned of drifting landmines unearthed by the flooding.
Kyiv said several months ago the dam had been mined by Russian forces that have controlled it since early in the 15-month-old operation, and has suggested Moscow blew it up to try to prevent Ukrainian forces crossing the Dnipro in their counteroffensive.
Residents in the flood zone in Ukraine’s south, a fertile, marshy region stretching to the Dnipro estuary on the Black Sea, blamed the bursting of the dam on Russian troops who controlled it from their positions on the opposite bank.
Russia imposed a state of emergency in the parts of Kherson province it controls, where many towns and villages lie in lowlands below the dam.
In the town of Nova Kakhovka right next to the dam, brown water submerged main streets largely empty of residents.
Over 30,000 cubic meters of water were gushing out of the dam’s reservoir every second and the town was at risk of contamination from the torrent, Russia’s TASS news agency quoted the Russian-installed mayor, Vladimir Leontyev, as saying.
Ukraine expects the floodwaters will stop rising by the end of Wednesday after reaching around five meters (16.5 feet) overnight, presidential deputy chief Oleksiy Kuleba said.
Two thousand people have been evacuated from the Ukrainian-controlled part of the flood zone and waters had reached their highest level in 17 settlements with a combined population of 16,000 people.
TASS said water levels could remain elevated in places for up to 10 days.
The mighty Dnipro River that bisects Ukraine forms the front line across the south. The huge reservoir behind the dam was one of Ukraine’s main geographic features, and its waters irrigated large areas of one of the world’s biggest grain-exporting nations, including Crimea, seized by Russia in 2014.
“The sheer magnitude of the catastrophe will only become fully realized in the coming days,” United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths told the UN Security Council.
Targeting dams in war is explicitly banned by the Geneva Conventions. Neither side has presented public evidence demonstrating who was responsible.
“The whole world will know about this Russian war crime,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address, calling it “an environmental bomb of mass destruction”. Earlier he said Russia blew up the dam power plant from within.
Russian President Vladimir Putin called the dam’s destruction an “environmental and humanitarian catastrophe” during a call with Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan, the Kremlin said on Wednesday.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov accused Ukraine on Tuesday of sabotaging the dam to distract attention from the counteroffensive he said was “faltering”.
Russia said a Ukrainian drone had struck a town on the opposite bank during evacuations there and accused the Ukrainian side of continuing shelling despite the flooding.