As floodwaters started to recede in the city of Kherson for the first time since the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, Ukrainian officials warned on Friday that coastal communities across southern Ukraine faced new perils as explosive devices wash up on beaches and debris threatens to trigger maritime mines close to shore.
Natalia Humeniuk, the spokeswoman for the Ukrainian military southern command, said that even seemingly innocuous-looking materials washing up on shores as far as Odesa could contain explosive devices.
Kherson sits at the mouth of the Dnipro River, where the destroyed dam is, and is the last major city before the river empties into the Black Sea. As floodwaters spread west, like ink spilled on paper, they are bringing wreckage to cities and towns along the seashore, including Odesa, a coastal city more than 100 miles from the dam, where a demolition team has already detonated a land mine that washed ashore.
Odesa residents have also reported roofs of houses, wall fragments, dead animals and even tombstones among the debris floating into the city.
Mr. Humeniuk, speaking at a news conference on Friday, said the humanitarian relief effort was being complicated by Russian forces’ direct targeting of evacuation points in the flood-stricken southern region of Kherson. She said that 20 people were injured on Thursday in a series of attacks and that Russian forces continued their bombardment at night, dropping four glide bombs on the flooded village of Beryslav.
At least two people were killed in the attacks in the Kherson region on Thursday, local officials said.
Emergency workers have enough aid supplies for the moment, she said, so Ukraine is limiting the number of humanitarian groups allowed to enter the region because of the risk of injuries from shelling that could further tax already strained medical services.
President Volodymyr Zelensky called the shelling of evacuation points, including one he visited on Thursday in Kherson, “a manifestation of evil that perhaps no terrorists in the world, except for Russian ones, have ever done.”
Mr. Zelensky also called on international aid organizations to demand that Moscow allow them to provide humanitarian assistance in flood-hit areas under the control of Russian forces. About 2,200 people have been evacuated from Ukrainian-controlled areas, according to United Nations officials, but less is known about the conditions in Russian-occupied territory.
Vladimir Saldo, the Kremlin-appointed head of the occupied part of Kherson, said on Friday that about 5,800 people had been rescued, though that figure could not be independently verified because Russia does not allow independent observers into occupied areas.
The destruction of the Russian-controlled dam early Tuesday morning unleashed torrents of water from a reservoir that held about the same volume as the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and it continued to drain on Friday. The dam is the last in a series of six that run the length of the Dnipro River, starting just outside Kyiv.
Officials at Ukrhydroenergo, the company that controlled the dam before Russian forces seized it in the first weeks of their full-scale invasion last year, said they were accumulating water in reservoirs farther upstream on the Dnipro to help ensure supplies for drinking, agriculture and other needs.
Even as floodwaters near the dam began to recede — falling by about a half-foot in Kherson by Friday morning — they are still rising further downriver. Experts said it would still be some time before the full extent of the devastation is revealed.
But Ukrainian environmental officials said the ecosystem in the vast estuary where the Dnipro River and the Black Sea meet was already ravaged. Ruslan Strilets, the Ukrainian minister of environmental protection and natural resources, said it would “be almost impossible to restore these ecosystems in their original form as created by nature.”
“And no amount of money in the world will return our unique nature to us,” he said.
Victoria Kim and Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting.
