Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated in eastern Russia and Kazakhstan due to severe flooding, authorities in both countries said on Saturday.
The water level in the flood-stricken south-western Russian city of Orenburg rose another 9 centimetres overnight to a record high, the regional head said earlier, while Kazakhstan cancelled a conference, diverting efforts and money to relief.
"In the early morning, the Ural River near Orenburg reached the 11.71-metre mark," Governor Denis Pasler wrote on Telegram.
Another 800 houses and 1,800 garden plots were flooded over the last 24 hours, the Russian authorities said.
In total, more than 3,000 houses in the city were underwater and thousands of people have had to leave their homes.
However, while the situation remained tense, it showed no deterioration over the past four hours, according to the governor.
"We expect this to be the plateau: There will be no further rise, the situation will stabilize and then the decline will begin," Pasler wrote.
The snowy winter led to one of the worst floods in decades in the Orenburg region, 1,200 kilometres east of Moscow. Before the regional capital Orsk was hit, where large parts of the old city were flooded after a dam burst on the river.
The more than 2,400-kilometre-long Urals, which geographers define as part of the border between Europe and Asia, drains southwards through Kazakhstan into the Caspian Sea.
Massive flooding in Kazakhstan left thousands of people homeless and caused severe devastation in several regions of the former Soviet republic.
More than 102,000 people have so far been rescued from the floods and brought to safety and a similar number of livestock have also been brought to safe places, the Kazakh embassy in Berlin said, citing civil defence authorities.
Some 1,100 tons of humanitarian aid have already been delivered to the affected regions in the north and east of Kazakhstan, the embassy said.
Given the situation, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev cancelled the Astana International Forum planned for mid-June "due to the severe flooding in Kazakhstan and the need to allocate financial resources for the relief efforts and aid for affected citizens."
The forum, which gathers representatives from politics and business from all over the world to discuss current issues, is to meet again next year, Tokayev wrote in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.