Ukrainian officials alarmed on Wednesday evening that Russian forces have targeted with eight cruise missiles a water dam on the Inhulets River near Kryvyi Rih, which led to residents being evacuated after parts of the city were flooded.
Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the military administration in Kryvyi Rih, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s home city, said in a statement on his channel on Telegram that city officials have asked residents to leave parts of the city after the water levels on the river rose following the Russian missiles’ attack on the very large hydro-technical structure.
According to the deputy head of the office of President Zelensky, Kyrylo Timoshenko, 112 houses in Kryvyi Rih were flooded and rescuers had to save 11 people, but no deaths have been reported.
After the water level in the Ingulets River rose from 100cm to 190cm, four collection points for citizens to evacuate were organized by local authorities in order to transfer them to a safe zone. Timoshenko explained that it was necessary to blow up part of the hydraulic structures downstream in order to lower the water level after the dam was damaged.
Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba also tweeted about the attack on the Kryvyi Rih’s water dam, stressing in its message that the missile strike on the hydraulic structures is a war crime and an act of terror by the, as he called them, Russian cowards which, beaten by Ukrainian army on the battlefield, are now at war with Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and civilians.
Kuleba reiterated that Russia is a terrorist state and must be recognized as such.
In other news overnight, five Ukrainian teenagers- four girls and a boy aged 15 to 17 -who had been locked in a basement without an explanation for a week by Russian troops in Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv region, were rescued by Ukraine’s state border guard service.