Kakhovka Dam Explosion Will be Devastating to Ukraine for One Main Reason

Ukraine has warned that the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam will leave hundreds of thousands of people without clean drinking water, amid concerns that supplies to southern Ukraine could be adversely impacted for years.

Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky said in a Telegram post on Wednesday of widespread water shortages, a day after reports of blasts at the dam at the hydroelectric power plant in Nova Kakhovka in the southern Kherson region, which have inundated settlements and led to mass evacuations.

Zelensky said that "Russian terrorists" had deliberately destroyed one of the largest water reservoirs in Ukraine, while Moscow has accused Ukraine of sabotaging the facility on the Dnieper River.

Alla Hurska, an analyst at the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank in Washington, D.C., said that with levels in the Kakhovka reservoir are falling at about six inches per hour, meaning severe water shortages are expected.

"How the water will actually behave will be fully known in a few days," Hurska told Newsweek. "However, the consequences will be extremely serious."

"There is a threat that people in the south of Kherson region and Crimea, especially the northern part of the peninsula, will be left without drinking water."

The reservoir provides around 70 percent of the water for Kryvyi Rih, a city in in the Dnipropetrovsk region, where local authorities have asked people to stock drinking water. The destroyed dam may impact water supply to the Mykolaiv and Zaporizhya regions, as well as further south.

Hurska said that the Russian military occupying Crimea had admitted they can no longer count on the North Crimean Canal to supply water to the peninsula.

Nova Kakhovka is downstream of the source to the start of the North Crimean Canal, which takes fresh water to the peninsula Russia seized in 2014.

"Many experts believe that this situation will deprive Crimea of water for many years," said Hurska, who is also an associate at Kyiv's International Center for Policy Studies.

Tetyana Tymochko, who heads the Ukrainian Ecological League and is an environmental adviser to Kyiv told independent news outlet Ukrinform that the dam's destruction "will have huge negative consequences for agriculture throughout the region."

"Crimea may be left without water for 10 to 15 years, and possibly forever," she said.

When contacted for comment, Ukrainian internal-affairs adviser Anton Gerashchenko referred Newsweek to a tweet he had posted on Wednesday outlining some of the environmental consequences of the dam's destruction which will become clearer when the water subsides.

He also said that the populations of hundreds of species of animals and plants in parts of the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions will be lost. In addition, around 1.5 million hectares of land in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia will not be suitable for crops and farming due to irrigation problems.