“Today at 10:00 a.m. six HIMARS rockets were hit. Air defense units shot down five missiles, one hit a lock of the Kakhovka dam, which was damaged,” Russian agencies said, citing local emergency services. Ukraine has warned in recent weeks that Moscow’s forces intended to blow up the strategic installation to cause flooding. Afterwards, the RIA Novosti news agency quoted a Moscow-backed local official as saying the damage was not “critical”. “Everything is under control. The main air defense strikes were repelled, one missile was hit [the dam]but it did not cause critical damage,” Ruslan Agayev, a spokesman for the Moscow-based administration of the nearby city of Novaya Kahovka, told the agency. The Kakhovka hydroelectric dam in southern Ukraine was captured by Moscow forces at the start of their offensive. It supplies water to the Russian-annexed Crimea. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russian troops of planning to blow it up to cause a catastrophic flood. Upstream of the dam is the Kakhovka Reservoir on the Dnipro River. The tank holds 18 cubic meters of water. Kyiv said the dam’s explosion would cause “large-scale devastation” and called for an international mission to be deployed to the dam.
