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Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of preparing to blow up a dam at a hydroelectric plant in southern Ukraine, which would lead to a "large-scale disaster".

In his overnight address he said the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper river had been mined by Russian forces, according to Ukrainian information.

The dam is under Russian occupation, but Ukrainian forces are closing in.

Russia has already accused Ukraine of firing missiles at the Kakhovka dam.

The dam also provides Russia with one of the few remaining routes across the Dnieper river in the partially occupied Kherson region. Russian-installed authorities in Kherson say four people were killed by Ukrainian Himars rockets that hit another key crossing, the Antonivskiy Bridge, on Friday.

Russia began evacuating its proxy authorities in Kherson this week but also said 50-60,000 civilians would leave too, a measure condemned as forced deportations by Kyiv authorities.

Russia's new military commander in Ukraine, Gen Sergei Surovikin, alleged that Ukrainian forces could be planning "banned methods of warfare" in Kherson city and the hydroelectric dam and argued that justified the "evacuation" of the civilian population.



If the Kakhovka dam were destroyed, Mr Zelensky warned it could devastate the water supply to much of the south and leave Europe's biggest nuclear plant at Zaporizhzhia without cooling water.

"The dam of this hydroelectric power plant holds a volume of about 18m cubic meters of water," he said. "If Russian terrorists blow up this dam, more than 80 settlements, including Kherson, will be in the zone of rapid flooding. Hundreds of thousands of people could be affected."

The Ukrainian leader also said if the dam were destroyed then the North Crimean Canal would "simply disappear".

The canal, built in 1975, provides Russian-annexed Crimea with a reported 85% of its water supply. An early act in Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February was blowing up a dam that Ukraine had built in the canal after the peninsula was seized in 2014, accusing Russia of not paying for the water.