Water levels were expected to rise by another meter (about 3 feet) by Thursday following the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, Ukrainian authorities predicted. While the flood's force was expected to ease on Wednesday, the rise in water levels would engulf more downstream areas along the banks of the Dnieper. Russian state media has reported that flooding could last up to 10 days in the Kherson region. The Kakhovka dam collapsed on Tuesday. It remained unclear what caused it.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of deliberately destroying the dam, while the Kremlin has blamed Kyiv's shelling for the breach. "The destruction of one of the largest water reservoirs in Ukraine is absolutely deliberate ... Hundreds of thousands of people have been left without normal access to drinking water," Zelenskyy wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

Moscow-installed authorities have imposed a state of emergency in the Russian-annexed part of the region. In the Ukrainian-controlled side of Kherson at least 1,582 houses have been flooded, and some 1,457 people have been evacuated overnight, governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said. Officials from Russia, Ukraine, and the UN have said that the damage will take days to assess and warned of a lengthy recovery period.

UN aid chief Martin Griffiths told the Security Council that the dam breach "will have grave and far-reaching consequences for thousands of people in southern Ukraine on both sides of the front line through the loss of homes, food, safe water, and livelihoods." "The sheer magnitude of the catastrophe will only become fully realized in the coming days," he said.

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