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President's Office: At least 150 tons of machine oil released into Dnipro River after Kakhovka dam explosion

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President's Office: At least 150 tons of machine oil released into Dnipro River after Kakhovka dam explosion
President Volodymyr Zelensky convened an emergency meeting of the National Security and Defense Council after Russian forces blew up the Kakhovka dam on June 6, 2023. (Photo: President's Office)

At least 150 tons of machine oil have been released into the Dnipro River after Russian forces blew up the Kakhovka dam on June 6, the President's Office reported.

According to the President's Office, there is a risk of 300 additional tons of machine oil leaking into the river.

President Volodymyr Zelensky convened an emergency meeting of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine after Russian forces destroyed the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant’s dam on the morning of June 6, sparking a large-scale humanitarian and environmental disaster across southern Ukraine.

The attack occurred around 2:50 a.m. local time, the President's office wrote.

No civilian or military casualties were reported as a result of the explosion, but 80 settlements are in the immediate flood zone.

The Interior Ministry reported that as of 11:00 a.m. local time, 885 civilians have been evacuated from Kherson Oblast. However, some of the settlements which face the biggest risk of flooding are under Russian occupation.

Kherson Oblast Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said that civilians evacuated from the critical risk zones are being transported by bus and train to Mykolaiv, Khmelnytsky, Odesa, Kropyvnytskyi, Kyiv, and other cities.

The members of the National Security and Defense Council agreed on a set of international measures following the attack, including convening a meeting of the UN Security Council and appealing to organizations such as the International Criminal Court.

Several world leaders have already publicly condemned Russia's destruction of the Kakhovka dam, with many of them calling it a war crime.

Russian forces destroy Kakhovka dam, triggering humanitarian disaster
The dam of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant across the Dnipro River, occupied by Russian forces, was destroyed on the morning of June 6, sparking a large-scale humanitarian and environmental disaster across southern Ukraine. Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported early in the morning…
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Kate Tsurkan

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Kate Tsurkan is a reporter at the Kyiv Independent who writes mostly about culture-related topics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Her newsletter Explaining Ukraine with Kate Tsurkan, which focuses specifically on Ukrainian culture, is published weekly by the Kyiv Independent and is partially supported by a generous grant from the Nadia Sophie Seiler Fund. The U.S. publisher Deep Vellum published her co-translation of Ukrainian author Oleh Sentsov’s Diary of a Hunger Striker in 2024. Some of her other writing and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Harpers, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Apofenie Magazine.

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