In a video clip posted on his Telegram channel, Leontyev confirmed that the water level in Novaya Kakhovka had risen 10 meters.
And Leontyev said that the water washed out the dam of the hydroelectric power station, and the maximum water level could reach 12 meters.
“Our task now is to get people out, to exclude the possibility of an electric shock, and therefore residential areas downstream are disconnected from electricity. People are moving to safe places. There is no there’s no need to panic,” he said.
Later, the Russian news agency Tass reported that the (pro-Russian) authorities had declared a state of emergency in the Russian-controlled part of the dam perimeter, from where water is flowing unchecked.
The Russian and Ukrainian sides exchange accusations about who was responsible for the accident, in a scene that was absent from the fact that the dam was shelled and directly targeted today, or that the collapse occurred following the shelling that surrounded the dam during the Ukrainian war.
While Ukraine accused Russian forces of blowing up part of the dam and warned residents along the Dnipro River to evacuate the area and warned them of flooding, Russian officials said replied that the Kakhovka dam had been damaged by Ukrainian military strikes in the disputed area. area.
Ukraine warns
Ukraine has warned that the risk of a nuclear disaster at the Zaporizhya power plant is “increasing rapidly” after the explosion of the Nova Kakhovka dam.
Earlier, Kiev warned that the dam’s collapse could release 18 million cubic meters of water and flood Kherson and dozens of other areas where hundreds of thousands of people live, as well as threaten to flood an area near the nuclear power plant, which is occupied by Russia.
Ukrainian nuclear energy company Energoatom said in a statement via the Telegram app that the dam explosion “could have negative consequences for the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant”, but that the situation is currently “under control”.
The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency wrote on Twitter that its experts are closely monitoring the situation at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant and that there is “no immediate threat to nuclear security” in the nuclear power plant. ‘facility.
According to a working group on the environmental effects of the Ukrainian war, the complete collapse of the dam would take away a large part of its left bank, and the sharp reduction in the stock of water in the reservoir could lead to deprivation of the nuclear power plant. of the necessary cooling, in addition to the drying up of the water supply in Crimea. .
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called an emergency meeting to deal with the crisis.
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