Ukraine has not yet launched a planned counteroffensive to win back territory occupied by Russia, and its start will be obvious to everyone when it happens, a senior security official said on Wednesday.
Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council, dismissed statements by Russian officials who have said the counteroffensive has already begun.
“All of this is not true. When all this will begin, it will be decided by our military,” Danilov told Reuters in an interview. “When we start the counteroffensive, everyone will know about it, they will see it.”
Danilov said Russian officials had mistaken local Ukrainian advances in some frontline areas for the start of the larger operation.
That’s it from me, Léonie Chao-Fong, and the Russia-Ukraine war live blog today. Here’s a quick recap of today’s developments:
About 42,000 people are estimated to be at risk from flooding after the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam, a major hydroelectric dam on the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine, on the frontline between Russian and Ukrainian forces. At least people have been confirmed dead as a result of flooding, Ukrainian media outlets reported on Wednesday, citing the exiled mayor of the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky in Kherson region.
Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been left “without normal access to drinking water” after the destruction, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has warned. The Ukrainian leader said the evacuation of people and the urgent provision of drinking water were top priorities.
Drone footage showed roads and buildings in Kherson completely submerged by flood water. The critical dam, which lies along the Dnipro River in Ukraine’s Kherson region – now held by Russia – collapsed on Tuesday, flooding a swathe of the war’s frontline.
Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of blowing up the dam on Tuesday. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin on Wednesday accused Kyiv of destroying the Kakhovka dam at the suggestion of the west, in what he called a “barbaric” war crime that escalated the conflict with Moscow.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, told Putin in a phone call on Wednesday that a comprehensive investigation was needed into the destruction of the dam. Erdoğan told Putin that an international commission that includes the UN and Turkey could be formed to look into the issue, a statement from the Turkish president’s office said.
Britain cannot yet say Russia is responsible for the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam, prime minister Rishi Sunak has said on Wednesday. Asked during a visit to the US whether Russia was responsible, Sunak said: “I can’t say that definitively yet” but that “if true […] it will represent a new low. It’s an appalling act of barbarism on Russia’s part.”
The US “cannot say conclusively” who was responsible for the destruction of the dam, national security council spokesperson John Kirby said on Tuesday. “We’re doing the best we can to assess”, he told reporters at the White House, noting “destruction of civilian infrastructure is not allowed by the laws of war”.
President Zelenskiy also accused the occupying Russian authorities in southern Kherson on the left bank of the Dnipro of failing in their duty to evacuate residents, and said Ukraine would appeal to international organisations to assist those people.
The governor of Lviv has issued a public welcome for evacuees from Kherson to come to his region in western Ukraine. Lviv will be sending humanitarian aid to Kherson, Maksym Kozytskyi said in a Telegram post on Wednesday.
France will send aid to Ukraine “to meet immediate needs” after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, President Emmanuel Macron has said following a conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart on Wednesday. Macron said he expressed solidarity with the people of Ukraine in the aftermath of what he described as an “atrocious act which is endangering populations’
A top Moscow-backed official in a part of Ukraine controlled by Russia has said that the collapse of the dam had handed the Russian military a tactical advantage. Vladimir Saldo said he believed Kyiv was to blame for the disaster but that the dam’s destruction and resulting flood waters would make it easier for Russia to defend against any Ukrainian counter-offensive in the area.
Relief workers on the Ukraine-controlled right bank of the river have reported having to work under fire. The UN’s humanitarian aid agency warned the disaster “will likely get worse in the coming hours”, with access to drinking water and health risks associated with contaminated water among the most pressing concerns.
Ukraine has not yet launched a planned counteroffensive to win back territory occupied by Russia, a senior Ukrainian security official said on Wednesday. Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council, dismissed statements by Russian officials who have said the counteroffensive has already begun, adding that its start will be obvious to everyone when it happens.
Russia’s defence ministry has said “Ukrainian saboteurs” had blown up a section of the Togliatti-Odesa ammonia pipeline on Monday, which carries fertiliser from Russia to Ukraine in Kharkiv region. There was no immediate comment on the allegations from Ukraine.
A group of Nato countries may be willing to put troops on the ground in Ukraine if member states do not provide tangible security guarantees to Kyiv at the alliances’s summit in Vilnius, the former Nato secretary general Anders Rasmussen has said. Current Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance must discuss options for giving Ukraine security assurances for the time after its war with Russia.
Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg has said he will chair a meeting on Thursday of an emergency coordination panel with Ukraine on the “outrageous destruction” of the Kakhovka dam.
Posting to Twitter earlier on Wednesday, Stoltenberg said he had spoken with Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, about the dam’s destruction, “which is displacing thousands of people and causing an ecological catastrophe”.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has called on international aid organisations to take immediate action to help people in the aftermath of the collapse of the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine.
The situation for residents in areas of the Kherson region occupied by Russian troops was “absolutely catastrophic”, Zelenskiy said in his daily video address. He accused Russian forces of having “simply abandoned people in these terrible conditions”, “without rescue, without water, just on the rooftops in flooded communities”.
Zelenskiy said:
We need international organizations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, to immediately join the rescue operation and help people in the occupied part of Kherson region.
Each person who dies there is a verdict on the existing international architecture and international organizations that have forgotten how to save lives.
The fields of southern Ukraine could “turn into deserts” by next year, the country’s agrarian and food ministry said after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and the draining of its reservoir, which had irrigated one of the world’s breadbaskets.
Ukrainian emergency services and aid organisations carried out a second day of rescue operations to help the 42,000 people estimated to be at immediate risk from flooding downstream of the dam, including making some forays to the Russian-occupied left bank of the Dnipro River to save people cut off in flooded towns.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the Russian occupation authorities were “not even trying to help people”.
“This once again demonstrates the cynicism with which Russia treats the people whose land it has captured,” Zelenskiy said.
The president also severely criticised the UN and the Red Cross who he said were not helping the relief effort.
Many hours after the disaster, “they aren’t here”, Zelenskiy told Bild, Die Welt and Politico.
We have had no response. I am shocked.
At least three people have died as a result of flooding after the destruction of the massive Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine, Ukrainian media outlets are reporting, citing Yevhen Ryshchuk, the exiled mayor of the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky in Kherson region.
The victims are reported to have drowned, the Kyiv Independent reports.
Drone footage from Ukraine showed the extent of flooding in the country’s south, after the region’s Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric station were largely destroyed.
The footage showed roads and buildings in Kherson completely submerged by flood water. The critical dam, which lies along the Dnipro River in Ukraine’s Kherson region – now held by Russia – collapsed on Tuesday, flooding a swathe of the war’s frontline.
Britain has said it will increase funding to the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, by £750,000 to support nuclear safety work in Ukraine.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant gets its cooling water from the reservoir of the Kakhovka dam, which collapsed on Tuesday.
Ukrainian and UN experts have said the dam’s destruction and the draining of the reservoir behind it does not pose an immediate safety threat to the plant further upstream, but warned that it will have long-term implications for its future.
IAEA head Rafael Mariano Grossi said in a statement on Tuesday that “our current assessment is that there is no immediate risk to the safety of the plant.” But there are long-term concerns, both over safety and the possibility of the plant becoming operational again in the coming years.
Reuters reports the UK’s permanent representative to the IAEA, Corinne Kitsell, as saying:
Russia’s barbaric attacks on Ukraine’s civil infrastructure and its illegal control of Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant runs contrary to all international nuclear safety and security norms.
She added:
I commend the work of the IAEA’s staff in Ukraine and I am pleased that the UK’s additional funding will help to facilitate its vital work, particularly given the additional risk posed by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.
A US expert on the Russian military has said he was sceptical the collapse of the massive Kakhovka dam would hamper Ukraine’s near-term military plans for a counter-offensive.
Michael Kofman, director of the Russian studies programme at the US-based CNA think-tank, said he doubted the dam’s destruction would have a “significant impact on Ukraine’s military operations”. He wrote on Twitter:
The Khakovka dam is at least 100 miles from where much of the activity might take place at its closest point.
He added:
A Ukrainian cross-river operation in southern Kherson, below the dam, was always a risky and therefore low-probability prospect. There is no evidence that such an operation was underway, or would have necessarily been a part of the Ukrainian offensive plans.
A group of Nato countries may be willing to put troops on the ground in Ukraine if member states including the US do not provide tangible security guarantees to Kyiv at the alliances’s summit in Vilnius, the former Nato secretary general Anders Rasmussen has said.
Rasmussen, who has been acting as official adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, on Ukraine’s place in a future European security architecture, has been touring Europe and Washington to gauge the shifting mood before the critical summit starts on 15 July.
He also warned that even if a group of states did provide Ukraine with security guarantees, others would not allow the issue of Ukraine’s future Nato membership to be kept off the agenda at Vilnius.
He made his remarks as the current Nato chief, Jens Stoltenberg, said the issue of security guarantees would be on the agenda at Vilnius, but added that Nato – under article 5 of the Washington treaty – only provided full-fledged security guarantees to full members.
The US ambassador to Nato, Julianne Smith, said:
We are looking at an array of options to signal that Ukraine is advancing in its relationship with Nato.
The people living along Ukraine’s lower Dnipro River must contend with the immediate consequences of the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam and flee for safety with whatever they can salvage, but the wider impact could make itself felt for generations.
Downstream, the flood waters will subside somewhat as the surge reaches the Black Sea, but many of the villages and towns along the course of the Dnipro may not be habitable again unless and until a new dam is built. Thousands of homes and livelihoods have been swept away, along with countless domesticated and wild animals.
The ecological trauma of such an inundation of water and silt has changed the landscape in an instant, wiping away islands and wetlands. It could take years if not decades for the fauna and flora to bounce back. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, called it the “largest man-made environmental disaster in Europe in decades”. It is the country’s misfortune to have also been the site of the Chornobyl disaster in 1986, arguably the last calamity on such a scale.
With a reservoir of 18bn cubic metres, Nova Kakhovka was one the dams with the largest capacity in the world, according to Mohammad Heidarzadeh, a senior lecturer in the architecture and civil engineering department at the UK’s University of Bath. It was 90 times bigger than the largest dam reservoir in Britain, the Kielder dam in Northumberland.
Heidarzadeh said:
It is obvious that the failure of this dam will definitely have extensive long-term ecological and environmental negative consequences not only for Ukraine but for neighbouring countries and regions.
Along with all the debris carried along by the rushing waters are tens of thousands of mines. The flood waters are rolling through a frontline in the war. The banks of the Dnipro have been frontlines since at least November, when Ukrainian forces drove the Russians across the river to the southern bank. Both sides laid mines along the waterfront and they have now been washed away and will be distributed randomly in towns, villages and farmland downstream. A flood means civilians can be blown up many kilometres from a conflict zone, many years after the war.
Read the full story by my colleague Julian Borger here:
President Joe Biden will host Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, in Washington on 12 June, according to a White House statement.
The pair will discuss support for Ukraine, the statement reads, as well as review preparations for the upcoming Nato summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Here are some images we have received over the news wires from flooded Kherson in southern Ukraine.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has also tweeted about his phone call with Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, following the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.
France “condemns this atrocious act”, Macron wrote, as he pledged to send aid to Ukraine “within the next few hours”.
Macron said:
I expressed to President Zelensky my solidarity with the Ukrainian people after the attack on the Kakhovka dam. France condemns this atrocious act, which is endangering populations. Within the next few hours, we will send aid to meet immediate needs.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said he had a “thorough” phone call with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, to discuss the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine.
Writing on Twitter, Zelenskiy said the pair spoke about “the environmental and humanitarian consequences” of what he described as a “Russian act of terrorism”. He said he also outlined the “urgent needs of Ukraine to eliminate the disaster”.
As we reported earlier, the Ukrainian leader said he was “shocked” by the what he said was the failure of the UN and the Red Cross to help after the destruction of the massive dam.
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2023-06-07 21:34:35Z
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