Terrifying moment BBC news crew are forced to flee when Russian shelling hits the area during interview about Kherson floods
- Ukraine was evacuating thousands on Wednesday attack on Russian-held dam
- In the video the reporter and resident duck for cover after deafening blast
Video footage has shown the terrifying moment a BBC news crew were forced to flee when Russian shelling hit the area during an interview about the Kherson floods.
Ukraine was evacuating thousands of people on Wednesday after an attack on a major Russian-held dam unleashed a torrent of water, inundating two dozen villages and sparking fears of a humanitarian disaster.
In the video, the interviewer asks a question and before the resident gets chance to respond a deafening blast can be overheard and they both duck for cover.
The camera jolts from side to side as the cameraman and the rest of the crew try to scramble to safety, hopping into a vehicle hurriedly as the shelling continues.
At the end of the video, a man lying in the road rushes to his feet to make way for the car as it drives on to a different location.
In the video, the interviewer is asking a question and before the resident gets chance to respond a deafening blast can be overheard
Both the resident and the reporter duck for cover as shelling hits the area
The destruction of the Moscow-controlled Nova Kakhvovka dam on the Dnipro River flooded a large part of the frontline in the Kherson region.
Residents in southern Ukraine are braced for a second day of swelling floodwaters as authorities warned that the dam breach would continue to unleash pent-up waters from a giant reservoir.
Ukrainian authorities said 17,000 people were being evacuated and a total of 24 villages had been flooded.
READ MORE: Putin ‘may try to blow up largest nuclear plant in Europe’, Ukraine warns after Russian-held dam is destroyed, causing humanitarian disaster and an ‘environmental bomb of mass destruction’
This handout SkySat image taken and released by Planet Labs PBC on June 6, 2023 shows water flowing through the damaged Kakhovka HPP dam in southern Ukraine
‘Over 40,000 people are in danger of being flooded,’ Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said, adding that 25,000 more people needed to be evacuated on the Russian-occupied side of the Dnipro.
‘The evacuation will continue tomorrow and in the coming days – by bus and train,’ presidential adviser Oleksiy Kuleba said late on Tuesday.
Officials said the waters are expected to rise following Tuesday’s dramatic rupture of the Kakhovka dam, about 44 miles to the east of the city of Kherson, but are not flowing with the same speed and intensity.
Ukraine has accused Russian forces of blowing up the dam and adjoining hydroelectric power station, which sits in an area Moscow has controlled for more than a year.
Russian officials blamed Ukrainian bombardment in the contested area, where the river separates the two sides.
Residents sloshed through knee-deep waters in their inundated homes as videos posted on social media showed rescue workers carrying people to safety, and an aerial video of waters filling the streets of Russian-controlled Nova Kakhovska on the eastern side of the river.
In Ukrainian-controlled areas on the western side, Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of Kherson Regional Military administration, said in a video that water levels are expected to rise by another 3ft over the next 20 hours.
‘The intensity of floods is slightly decreasing; however, due to the significant destruction of the dam, the water will keep coming,’ he said.
The UK’s Ministry of Defence, which regularly issues updates about the war, said the Kakhovka reservoir was at ‘record high’ water levels before the breach.
While the dam was not entirely washed away, the MoD warned that its structure ‘is likely to deteriorate further over the next few days, causing additional flooding’.
The camera jolts from side to side as the cameraman and the rest of the crew try to scramble to safety
The crew members hop into the vehicle and leave for a safer area as the sound of shelling continues
At the end of the video there is a man lying in the road who gets up to make way for the car as it drives past
Together with the power station, the dam helps provide electricity, irrigation and drinking water to a wide section of southern Ukraine, including the Crimean Peninsula, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
Government and UN officials have warned of a human and ecological disaster whose repercussions will take days to assess and far longer to recover from.
The dam break, which both sides had long feared, added a new dimension to Russia’s war, now in its 16th month.
Ukrainian forces were widely seen to be moving forward with a long-anticipated counteroffensive in patches along more than 621 miles of front line in the east and south.
Source: Read Full Article