"The entire city has been freed from water. We have begun pumping out water that is still in the basements. Energy supply has been launched," Leontiev told Russian broadcaster RBC.
Leontiev added that regular life activity in the district would be restored within a week, but even then there would be a lot of work to restore the region since it had suffered "enormous damage."
Later in the day, acting Kherson Governor Vladimir Saldo said that the number of people hospitalized from the flooded territories of the Kherson region had reached 77.
He noted that about 7,000 people were evacuated, including 323 children. Of the total number of evacuees, about 1,500 people are in temporary accommodation centers, Saldo added.
The upper part of the Kakhovka power plant on the Dnipro River was damaged overnight from Monday to Tuesday. It was not destroyed completely but its crumbling caused an uncontrollable outflow of water to towns downstream. Moscow and Kiev have blamed each other for the dam's destruction. Authorities in some of the affected areas evacuated the population.
The Novaya Kakhovka dam is the sixth and last stage of the cascade of Dnipro hydroelectric power plants located 5 kilometers from the city of Novaya Kakhovka in the Kherson Region, which became part of Russia through a referendum in September 2022.