A spokesman for Ukraine's emergency services, Oleksandr Khorunzhyi, said on television that "more than 1,450 people have been evacuated".
"Currently there is no information about the dead or injured," he said, adding that the water level in the city of Kherson had risen by five metres.
Officials have said thousands more will have to leave their homes and many are already doing so under their own steam.
The Moscow-installed deputy governor for Kherson region, Tatyana Kuzmich, said 1,274 were evacuated on the Russian-controlled side of the river.
Kuzmich said the figure included 38 people who had been rescued from the roofs of houses, adding that some residents were still stranded.
"According to data from the emergencies ministry, 1,274 have been rescued, 32 of them disabled," she said on Russian state television.
She said there were currently 350 people staying in temporary shelters.
A Russian occupation official in the town of Golaya Pristan, Gennady Nedyalkov, said up to 1,500 people would be evacuated from the town on Wednesday.
"We have already taken out more than 200 people," he said.
Destroyed dam likely to hinder Ukraine before Russia
Paris (AFP) June 6, 2023 - The gaping hole blasted into a key hydroelectric dam in southern Ukraine on Tuesday will severely impede Kyiv's efforts to reconquer territory lost to Russia, even if Moscow risks seeing its defensive lines submerged.
Moscow and Kyiv traded blame for the damage to the Kakhovka dam, which is designed to supply water to the Crimean Peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014, which could now be facing serious water supply problems.
But Western observers believe the sabotage is a Russian attempt to harm Kyiv in the short term, just as Ukraine prepares to launch a counteroffensive to regain areas in the east.
Kyiv shares the same view, having accused Russia of having "blown up" the dam in order to "slow down" its operation.
Floods have already forced thousands to evacuate and risks interrupting ongoing Ukrainian military operations.
The rising water in the Kherson region will make it very difficult for Ukraine forces to carry out any operation involving crossing the river to reclaim the eastern bank, in the direction of Crimea.
"Following the logic of cui bono [who benefits], Russia would be the obvious culprit, since by causing floods downstream of Nova Kakhovka, the Russians would complicate Ukraine's efforts to cross, winning time, which would allow them to focus on other sections of the front," said Sergey Radchenko, a history professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in a Twitter post.
"I can't see anything near beneficial to Ukraine in this case. More destroyed infrastructure, more downed electricity production facilities, more suffering for Ukrainian civilians, a limitation of Ukrainian offensive and logistics options," said Stephane Audrand, an independent consultant on international risks.
- Floods as a weapon of war -
The risk of strikes on the strategic Kakhovka facility, located in the Russian-occupied areas of the Kherson region, has been brandished since October by both Ukrainians and Russians.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Moscow of having "undermined the dam", one of the largest in Ukraine. Russian authorities retorted: "lies".
Destruction of this magnitude, likely to cause considerable harm to civilians, is considered a war crime under the 1949 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Convention.
"Dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population," according to Article 56.
Contemporary history offers many examples of the destruction of dams and floods in Europe for defensive and offensive purposes.
In 1941, the Soviet Union blew up a huge dam in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia to slow the German advance.
In May 1943, the British Royal Air Force bombed German dams in the Ruhr valley, the country's industrial heartland.
Carried out by the RAF squadron 617 -- which earned the nickname "Dambusters" -- this operation destroyed two of three dams and damaged the third.
The effort was immortalised in the 1955 film "The Dam Busters".
The flooding tactic was also practised in the First World War.
In the autumn of 1914, during the Battle of Yser, French and Belgian forces unleashed floods to slow the advance of German troops who were attempted in cross the Yser River toward Dunkirk.
The flooding was orchestrated by tampering with the system of locks in Nieuwpoort, which regulates the influx of seawater and drainage to flood plains.
Russian-held city 'flooded' after dam breach
Moscow (AFP) June 6, 2023 -
The Russian-occupied city of Nova Kakhovka in southern Ukraine -- home to the dam that Moscow and Kyiv have accused each other of attacking -- is "flooded", officials said Tuesday.
Russian television showed images of the city that lies on the Dnipro river with its central square entirely flooded and swans swimming near the main Soviet-era house of culture.
"Water is rising," Vladimir Leontyev, the Russian-installed head of the city administration, said on Telegram.
He said 53 buses were being sent by authorities to take people from Novaya Kakhovka and two nearby settlements to safe areas.
"We are organising temporary accommodation centres with hot meals," he said.
"Emergency rescuers, city administration workers and soldiers are at work," he said. "Help will be given to all those who need it."
Leontyev posted a video of himself looking at the city from a high-rise building with the flooded central square and the Dnipro river in the background.
A reporter on Russian state television, speaking from the square, said water was rising around a statue of Lenin erected by Moscow's forces after taking control of the city on the first day of their offensive.
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