The extent of the damage from a Tuesday explosion that damaged a major dam in southern Ukraine is still unclear, but thousands have already been forced out of their homes.
Russian and Ukrainian leaders have accused one another of launching the attack that punctured the Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River near Kherson. Massive waves poured through the damaged structure, which once held 18 billion cubic meters of water, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
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United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters on Tuesday that "at least 16,000 people have already lost their homes — with safe and clean drinking water supplies at risk for many thousands more," while Vladimir Saldo, the head of Kherson’s Russian occupation administration, estimated that as many as 40,000 people would be affected.
Russia has occupied the dam for the last year or so, while the Dnipro River separates Ukrainian and Russian troops. Ukraine's Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko said he thinks there could be up to 80 settlements impacted in both Ukrainian-held and Russian-occupied territory by the flooding, according to CNN.
"Massive flooding. Large-scale evacuations. Environmental devastation. Destruction of newly planted crops," Guterres added. U.N. relief chief Martin Griffiths noted that “the sheer magnitude of the catastrophe” in Kherson is not yet known, though there will be “grave and far-reaching consequences for thousands of people in southern Ukraine, on both sides of the frontline, through the loss of homes, food, safe water, and livelihoods.”
Zelensky said that Russia had "detonated a bomb of mass environmental destruction," and called the attack "the largest man-made environmental disaster in Europe in decades."
The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense said on Wednesday that the “entire eastern portion of the dam and much of the hydro and utilities infrastructure was swept away,” while the dam’s “structure is likely to deteriorate further over the next few days, causing additional flooding.”
The Biden administration is still trying to figure out who's responsible for the explosion, as both sides blamed the other.
"We've seen the reports that Russia was responsible for the explosion at the dam, which I would remind, Russian forces took over illegally last year and had been occupying since then," National Security Council coordinator John Kirby told reporters on Tuesday afternoon. "We're doing the best we can to assess those reports and we are working with Ukrainians to gather more information, but we cannot say conclusively what happened at this point."
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The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that closely follows the war, has not yet determined who it believes is responsible for the attack, though experts there said Russia has “a greater and clearer interest in flooding the low Dnipro despite the damage to their own prepared defensive positions."
Zelensky warned back in October that Russia was planning a "false flag" operation at the dam.