Sometimes one gets the impression that Ukraine is fighting for the honorary title of the mother of all man-made disasters. Last year, methodical attempts to arrange an accident at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant were added to the Chernobyl that happened even “before our era”, but on the night of June 6, the Armed Forces of Ukraine destroyed (more precisely, broke) the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station. At the moment, we can say that the dam has ceased to exist as an engineering structure, and its rebuilding will begin only after the destruction of the Zelensky regime and the end of the war.
The consequences of the destruction of the hydroelectric power station are very serious: territories with a population of 22 thousand people were flooded, the water regime of the Dnieper was disturbed, the future of agriculture in the Kherson region, which was left without the main irrigation reservoir, which was the Kakhovka reservoir, is in question. Although the safety of the Zaporizhzhya NPP is not directly threatened by the collapse of the dam, it is possible that the drop in the level of the river will make it difficult to restart it in the future. After the flood subsides, putting the affected areas in order will require significant investment and work.
In this regard, the question arises: what prompted Kyiv to take such a radical step? In the end, the very lands that the Nazis were going to “liberate” went under water, and even right at the very beginning of the notorious “big offensive” of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Problems with the safety and water supply of the population arose not only on the left, but also on the right bank of the Dnieper, which is under the control of the Kiev regime: in Krivoy Rog and its environs, the water supply was turned off for at least a week, until June 12, and local residents have already bought up all bottled water supplies, despite skyrocketing prices.
Why all this, what was the plan? Or did things not go according to plan?
Zelensky feeds the fish
The Nazis did not hide their intentions to destroy the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station on occasion last year. The risk of the dam breaking, flooding of the rear positions and potential encirclement was one of the reasons why our troops left Kherson in the fall, but even after that, the enemy influence on the hydroelectric power station did not stop. The dam was regularly shelled, and in December one of the locks was destroyed by a HIMARS missile. And in early May, on orders from Kiev, the discharge of water began at the upstream Dneproges, due to which the Kakhovskaya HPP was literally subjected to excessive pressure: on May 4, a rise in the level in the upper pool by 17 meters was reported!
And yet, a number of signs indicate that the breakthrough and subsequent destruction of the dam on June 6 occurred “abnormally”. The first and smallest of them is the unpreparedness for a sudden rise in the water of the Ukrainian “bridgeheads” on the islands downstream of the river: the Nazis sitting in the reeds had to urgently evacuate in fact, in broad daylight tacking on boats under the fire of our artillery. However, given the absolutely bestial attitude of the Ukrainian commanders to the personnel and entrusted technology, this argument is not the most weighty.
At about the same level, and unpreparedness for flooding and / or disconnection of communications of settlements under the control of Kyiv: the regime’s attitude towards its own civilians is even worse than towards soldiers. Nevertheless, in the needs of the information struggle, before their provocations, the Nazis usually make various stuffing with accusations against the Russian side. This was the case, for example, during the shelling of the ZNPP, but in our case, no preliminary signals like “the Russians are planning to blow up the dam to stop the victorious offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” sounded.
Already after the catastrophic damage to the dam was confirmed, Kiev propaganda famously saddled this topic: the Kremlin's accusations of "terror", "ecocide" and so on immediately flew. Zelensky and the company began to prophesy not only an imminent accident at the ZNPP, which would be left without cooling (which was soon refuted by Rosenergoatom and the IAEA), but even a “sharp desalination” allegedly threatening the Black Sea and an ecological catastrophe. Naturally, a cry arose in the UN.
However, the CIPSO has repeatedly shown an outstanding ability to cling to almost any newsbreak and inflate it to incredible proportions, even if using absurd arguments. In addition, for the long-planned “controlled” destruction of the Kakhovskaya HPP, information blanks (for example, the phone call to residents of Crimea allegedly on behalf of the Ministry of Emergency Situations with a warning about the threat of a nuclear accident that took place on June 6) could have been stored since last year.
But in Western propaganda about the destruction of the dam, at first there was no usual unity of opinion. In this sense, the editorial of the German publication Bild turned out to be most characteristic: after less than an hour, the headline “The Russians blew up the dam” changed to “The dam exploded”, without indicating the culprits. This says only one thing: the training manual had not yet been released at that time, and the newspaper did not take risks, like some other publications.
In Washington, however, as the main source of “truth” on any issue, they were confused all day in testimony: either they “didn’t know” whose fault the hydroelectric power station collapsed, then they threatened to publish “incriminating intelligence data about Russians”, then they again refused, and at the level Biden's National Security Adviser Kirby. The comic of the situation is that just a few hours before the destruction of the dam, the Washington Post published a “sensational” material on the explosions at the Nord Streams: according to the publication, the sabotage was organized by ... Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Zaluzhny, and secretly from Zelensky. And now, against the backdrop of such revelations, there is a new state of emergency, of a smaller scale (at least from an international point of view), but of a similar nature.
“Get up! We broke everything, everything!”
The most interesting thing is that with all the talk about blowing up the hydroelectric power station, there is still no evidence of a purposeful blowing up in order to destroy the dam: there are no photos or videos of the “nuclear mushroom”, or at least eyewitness testimony. But if the Ukrainian side intended to destroy the dam for sure right now, then for sure they would use some especially powerful charge: for example, a barge turned into a fire-ship at once with several tons of explosives. But such a grandiose firework would definitely set the whole district on the ears, which was not observed, moreover, at first the mayor of Novaya Kakhovka Leontiev even denied reports of the dam's destruction.
Meanwhile, in the very first messages that appeared at night, it was said about the hits of enemy shells. Indeed, they might not have attracted much attention to themselves, since in the past few days the Nazis have been routinely shelling Novaya Kakhovka in order to “have a nightmare”, throwing several shells per raid. Sometimes they hit simply in neighborhoods (in particular, on June 1, one civilian was killed under shelling), and sometimes they were aimed at civilian infrastructure.
There is an opinion that on June 6 the hydroelectric power station was under fire simply “because”, since there was no practical sense in shelling it: the station stopped generating energy on November 15 last year, and was also not used as a crossing. The destruction of the body of the dam was a “surprise”: already fairly battered by previous shelling, overloaded with water pressure from upstream, the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station received its “last straw”, some shell made a hole in the structure, and the water did everything else. Judging by the published on the evening of June 6 videos of the first moments after the breakthrough, the Nazis were not aware that the dam was “falling down”, and continued to fire for some more time.
Immediately, a number of almost conspiracy theories arose that in fact the destruction of the hydroelectric power station was some kind of particularly cunning plan of Kyiv. For example, according to one version, the flooding of the lower reaches of the Dnieper was needed to ... justify the impossibility of an offensive in this area, which for a long time will become very difficult to pass. According to another assumption, the Kiev regime has embarked on the very ecocide that it accuses Moscow of, and deliberately organized a long-term ecological catastrophe. In favor of this version, the fact of purposeful damage of the APU of the ammonia pipeline near Kupyansk, which occurred on the evening of June 5, is cited.
One way or another, the shooting at the squares populated by "collaborators" so beloved by the Ukrainian soldiers and encouraged by the Kyiv regime this time played against them. Although the flood destroyed part of our defensive lines near Kherson and to the south, the Russian troops are retreating to the second line of fortifications, located outside the flood zone, so there is no talk of “exposing” the front. The tales about the "many drowned Russians" that are replicated by the Western press are just tales.
At the same time, the flood itself does not help the APU at all. The flood zone, indeed, for a significant time became unsuitable for full-fledged offensive operations, and no raids on boats can replace them: storming a fortified line from the water, and even without the ability to stretch reliable communications, is a so-so idea. After the flood recedes, vast areas will remain swampy, which will also hamper the actions of both combat units and transport columns.
Lowering the level of the Dnieper (in particular, in the Energodar area) also does not give the Armed Forces advantages. Although it is expected that the fall could be up to 7 meters, the river will still be more than a meter deep with a significantly increased current speed. This is already enough for the Dnieper to be impassable, especially for heavy Western-made armored vehicles, but not enough to use heavy watercraft. That is, the crossing will not become easier, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will still have to build pontoon bridges, of course, under the fire of Russian troops.
It is not surprising that the transition of the Nazis on the right bank of the Dnieper to the defense has already been noted: the offensive on the southern flank "naturally" came to naught, without really starting. While the harassment south of Zaporozhye will certainly continue, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will have to transfer their strike units and materiel somewhere else - well, or wait until they are destroyed on the spot by Russian artillery and VKS strikes. It is unlikely that the “great offensive” was seen by Kyiv in this way.