MOSCOW, June 10. /TASS/. Floodwaters, which inundated Novaya Kakhovka after the incident at the Kakhovka Hydro Power Plant, have almost completely receded, Mayor Vladimir Leontyev said.
"The whole city is basically water-free, we are pumping water out of the basements," he said on the RBC TV channel.
Vladimir Saldo, Acting Governor of the Kherson Region, wrote on his Telegram channel that the Russian Health Ministry had dispatched health professions to the region to provide medical assistance to the people affected by the floods.
"Among them is a deputy minister, who is a member of the crisis center established by the president’s order to eliminate the aftermath of the emergency," he said.
Saldo recalled that Health Minister Mikhail Murashko had said that a batch of medicines, including Hepatitis A vaccine doses, had been sent to the region.
To date, Saldo reported, more than 6,000 people, including 235 children, have been evacuated from the flooded areas in the region. As many as 795 personnel and 344 pieces of equipment are involved in the effort to grapple with the aftermath. Saldo said that incessant Ukrainian shelling interferes with this work.
On June 6, the Ukrainian military launched a missile attack on the Kakhovka Hydro Power Plant, which resulted in the destruction of gate sluice valves at the HPP’s dam, triggering an uncontrolled discharge of water. There are 35 communities in the flood zone, and residents of the nearby populated localities are being evacuated. According to updates, eight people have died (two of them were killed as a result of Ukrainian shelling of the evacuation point), and more than 60 have been hospitalized.
The destruction of the hydro power plant has caused serious environmental damage, with farmlands along the Dnieper River being washed away. On top of that, there is a risk that the North Crimean Canal may run low and become too shallow.
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the strike on the Kakhovka Hydro Power Plant as an act of deliberate sabotage by Ukrainian forces, adding that the Kiev regime should bear all of the responsibility for its consequences.