About 600 square kilometers of the Kherson region in southern Ukraine was under water on Thursday following the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, the regional governor said.

Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said 68% of the flooded territory was on the Russian-occupied left bank of the Dnipro River, Reuters reported. The “average level of flooding” in the Kherson region on Thursday morning was 5.61 meters, he said.

“We’re already working. We will help everyone that has ended up in trouble,” he said in a video statement of the flooding caused by the collapse of the dam, which is about 60 km upstream from Kherson.

Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and Ukraine blame each other for the destruction of the Russian-occupied dam on Tuesday.

“Despite the immense danger and constant Russian shelling, evacuation from zones of flooding is continuing,” Prokudin said.

He said almost 2,000 people had left flooded territory as of Thursday morning.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video address late on Wednesday that it was impossible to predict how many people would die in Russian-occupied areas due to the flooding.

A man armed with four handguns killed two people and wounded five others when he fired into a crowd outside a high school graduation ceremony in Richmond, Virginia, on Tuesday, police said.

Police said they arrested one suspect, a 19-year-old man who knew one of the victims and shot at him amid the crowd that had just emerged from the Huguenot High School’s commencement ceremony inside a theater on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University, Reuters reported.

The suspect was likely to be charged with two counts of second-degree murder in addition to other offenses, interim Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards told a press conference.

Edwards called the shooter’s behavior “disgusting and cowardly,” since his dispute appeared to be with just one person.

“When you have a crowd like this, innocent people are going to be caught up in the mayhem, and that’s what happened today. ” Edwards said. “Obviously, this should have been a safe space…It’s just incredibly tragic that someone decided to bring a gun to this incident and rain terror on our community.”

The United States has grown accustomed to mass shootings in public places such as schools, shopping centers and churches.

The mass shooting was the country’s 279th in the first 157 days of 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive, using the definition of four or more people are shot or killed in a single incident, not including the shooter.

The deceased were men aged 18 and 36, Edwards said. He did not confirm a WWBT television news report that the victims were father and son.

Among the wounded, a 31-year-old man suffered life-threatening injuries and four other males aged 14, 32, 55 and 58 were expected to survive, Edwards said.

In addition, a 9-year-old girl was struck by a car in the chaos that ensued, and multiple other people were injured in falls or suffered from anxiety, Edwards said.

The suspect fled the scene on foot and was captured in possession of four handguns, three of which may have been fired, he said, stressing that it was too early in the investigation to be certain.

A torrent of water burst through a huge dam on the Dnipro River that separates Russian and Ukrainian forces in southern Ukraine on Tuesday, flooding a swathe of the war zone and forcing villagers to flee.

Ukraine and its Western allies accused Russia of blowing up the dam in a deliberate war crime. The Kremlin said it was Ukraine that had sabotaged the dam, to distract attention from a counteroffensive Moscow claims is faltering. Some Russian-installed officials said the dam had burst on its own, Reuters reported.

Neither side offered immediate public evidence of who was to blame. The Geneva Conventions explicitly ban targeting dams in war, because of the danger to civilians posed by destruction of such “works and installations containing dangerous forces”.

By mid-morning in the city of Kherson on the Ukrainian-held side, a pier on a tributary of the Dnipro had already been submerged by the surge climbing the banks.

“The water level has so far risen one meter,” resident Oleksandr Syomyk told Reuters. “We’ll see what happens next but we hope for the best.”

The Nova Kakhovka dam supplies water to a swathe of southern Ukraine’s agricultural land, including the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula, as well as cooling the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. The vast reservoir behind it is one of the main geographic features of southern Ukraine, 240 km long and up to 23 km wide.

A swathe of countryside lies in the flood plain below, with villages on the Russian-held southern bank seen as particularly vulnerable.

The destruction of the dam creates a new humanitarian disaster in the center of the war zone and transforms the front lines just as Ukraine is unleashing a long-awaited counteroffensive to drive Russian troops from its territory.

Russia has controlled the dam since early in the war, although Ukrainian forces recaptured the northern side of the river last year. Both sides had long accused the other of planning to destroy it.

“Russian terrorists. The destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam only confirms for the whole world that they must be expelled from every corner of Ukrainian land,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

Russians had “carried out an internal detonation of the structures” of the dam. “About 80 settlements are in the zone of flooding,” he said on Telegram.

NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called it “an outrageous act, which demonstrates once again the brutality of Russia’s war in Ukraine”.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a regular news briefing: “We can state unequivocally that we are talking about deliberate sabotage by the Ukrainian side.”

The U.N. nuclear watchdog said the Zaporizhzhia power plant should have enough water to cool its reactors for “some months” from a separate pond located above the reservoir, and called for the pond to be spared.

The water level at the town immediately adjacent to the breached dam could rise by up to 12 meters, its Russia-installed mayor, Vladimir Leontyev, said on Telegram.

Video showed water surging through the remains of the dam – which is 30 meters tall and 3.2 km long.

Some 22,000 people living across 14 settlements in Kherson region are at risk of flooding, Russia’s RIA news agency quoted the Moscow-installed head of the region as saying. Kherson is one of five Ukrainian regions Moscow claims to have annexed.