Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has accused Russia of planning to detonate a dam at a hydroelectric plant in southern Ukraine, which would result in a “catastrophic event.”
According to Ukrainian information, he stated in his nighttime address that the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper river had been mined by Russian soldiers.
The dam is occupied by Russian soldiers, but Ukrainian forces are advancing.
Already, Russia has accused Ukraine of launching missiles at the Kahohvka dam.
Additionally, the dam supplies Russia with one of the few surviving crossings of the Dnieper River in the partially occupied province of Kherson. Friday, Ukrainian Himars rockets struck the Antonivskiy Bridge, according to Russian-installed authorities in Kherson. Four persons were reportedly killed.
This week, Russia began removing its surrogate authority in Kherson and stated that between 50,000 and 60,000 citizens would also evacuate, a move that Kyiv officials decried as forcible deportations.
General Sergei Surovikin, Russia’s new military commander in Ukraine, asserted that Ukrainian forces may be plotting “prohibited tactics of combat” in Kherson city and the hydroelectric dam and concluded that this justifies the “evacuation” of the civilian population.
According to the Institute for the Study of War, an independent US think tank, Russia is “likely continuing to prepare for a false flag attack” on the Kakhovka hydroelectric plant by creating “information conditions” for Russian forces to blow up the dam after they withdraw from western Kherson and then accuse Ukraine of flooding the river and surrounding settlements.
President Zelensky informed EU leaders via video on Thursday that Russia had already destroyed more than a third of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure to cause as many electrical and heating difficulties as possible this winter. For the first time since the beginning of the Russian invasion, Ukrainians were instructed to reduce their electricity consumption between 07:00 and 23:00.
Mr. Zelensky warned that the destruction of the Kakhovka dam may disrupt the water supply to a large portion of the south and leave Europe’s largest nuclear facility in Zaporizhzhia without cooling water.
“This hydroelectric power plant’s dam holds approximately 18 million cubic meters of water,” he stated. “If Russian terrorists detonate this dam, more than eighty communities, including Kherson, will be in the zone of fast inundation. There could be hundreds of thousands of affected individuals.”
The Ukrainian leader further stated that the North Crimean Canal would “just evaporate” if the dam were dismantled.
The 1975-built canal supplies over 85 percent of Crimea’s water supply, according to reports. In February, as part of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia blew up a dam that Ukraine had constructed in a canal after the peninsula was captured in 2014, alleging that Russia had not paid for the water.
Several Russian analysts have noted that the destruction of the Kakhovka dam would have the greatest impact on occupied territories, while dozens of Ukrainian settlements would also be severely impacted.
The pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that a dam explosion would cause a 5-meter-high tsunami that would sweep away all villages along the Dnieper at a speed of 25 kilometers per hour. Within two hours, the water was predicted to reach the city of Kherson and inundate wide territories for three days.
Mykhaylo Podolyak, however, stated that the mining of the dam was part of a “Surovikin strategy” that involved flooding areas to halt Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
President Zelensky stated that if the Russians were genuinely contemplating destroying the Kakhovka dam, it signified that they realized they would not only lose control of Kherson, but also the entire southern region, including Crimea.
