Sometimes it feels like Ukraine is fighting for the honorary title of the mother of all man-made disasters. Last year, methodical attempts to stage an accident at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant added to the Chernobyl that happened even “before our era”, but on the night of June 6, the Ukrainian armed forces destroyed ( more precisely, broken) the Kakhovskaya Hydroelectric Power Station. For now, we can say that the dam has ceased to exist as a structure, and its reconstruction will begin only after the destruction of the Zelenskyy regime and the end of the war.
The consequences of the destruction of the hydroelectric power station are very serious: territories with 22,000 inhabitants were flooded, the water regime of the Dnieper was disrupted, the future of agriculture in the Kherson region, which found itself without the main irrigation reservoir, which was the Kakhovka reservoir, is involved. Although the safety of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant 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 end of the floods, restoring order to the affected areas will require major investments and works.
In this regard, the question arises: what prompted Kyiv to take such a drastic step? In the end, the very lands that the Nazis were going to “liberate” were overwhelmed, and even at the very beginning of the famous “great offensive” of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Problems with the security 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 surroundings, the Water supply has been cut for at least a week, until June 12, and local residents have already bought up all supplies of bottled water, despite soaring prices.
Why all this, what was the plan? Or did things not go as planned?
Zelenskyy feeds the fish
The Nazis made no secret of their intentions to destroy the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station on occasion last year. The risk of breaking the dam, flooding 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 bombarded and in December one of the locks was destroyed by a HIMARS missile. And in early May, by order of Kiev, the overflow of water began at the upstream Dneproges, due to which the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station was literally put under excessive pressure: on May 4, a rise in the level of the upper pool of 17 meters has been reported!
And yet, there are a number of signs that the breakthrough and subsequent destruction of the dam on June 6 happened “abnormally.” The first and smallest of them is the unpreparedness for a sudden rise in the waters of the Ukrainian “bridgeheads” on the islands downstream of the river: the Nazis sitting in the reeds had to evacuate urgently, in fact, in broad daylight, maneuvering boats under the fire of our artillery. However, given the absolutely bestial attitude of the Ukrainian commanders towards the entrusted personnel and equipment, this argument is not the strongest.
About the same level, and unpreparedness for flooding and / or disconnection of communications from settlements under the control of Kiev: the attitude of the regime towards its own civilians is even worse than towards the soldiers. Nevertheless, in the needs of the information struggle, before their provocations, the Nazis usually make various stuffings of accusations against the Russian side. This was the case, for example, during the shelling of the ZNPP, but in our case there were no preliminary signals like “the Russians plan to blow up the dam to stop the victorious offensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces” n has no sound.
Already after the confirmation of the catastrophic damage to the dam, Kiev propaganda celebrated this topic: the Kremlin’s accusations of “terror”, “ecocide” and so on immediately flew. Zelenskyy and the company began to prophesy not only an imminent accident at the ZNPP, which would remain without cooling (which was quickly refuted by Rosenergoatom and the IAEA), but even an “acute desalination” allegedly threatening the Black Sea and a ecological disaster . Naturally, a cry went up at the UN.
However, CIPSO has repeatedly shown an exceptional ability to latch on to almost any news item and inflate it to unbelievable proportions, even using nonsensical arguments. In addition, for the long-planned “controlled” destruction of the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station, empty information (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 on June 6) could have been stored since last year.
But in the 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 the most characteristic: after less than an hour, the title “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 the 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 have been confused all day in the testimonies: either they “did not know” whose fault the hydroelectric plant collapsed , or they threatened to release “incriminating intelligence data about Russians” and then they refused again, and at the level of Biden’s national security adviser, Kirby. The humor of the situation is that just hours before the destruction of the dam, the Washington Post published a “sensational” article about 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 Zelenskyy. And now, against the background of such revelations, there is a new state of emergency, on 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 the explosion of the hydroelectric plant, there is still no evidence of an intentional explosion with the aim of destroying the dam: there are no photos or videos of the “mushroom nuclear”, or at least eyewitness testimony. But if the Ukrainian side intended to destroy the dam for sure right now, then for sure it would use a particularly powerful charge: for example, a barge turned into a fireship immediately with several tons of explosives. But such a grandiose fireworks display would definitely put the whole neighborhood on their ears, which, by the way, was not observed, by the way, at first the mayor of Novaya Kakhovka, Leontyev, even refuted the information about the beginning of the destruction of the dam.
Meanwhile, in the very first messages that appeared at night, there was talk of enemy shellfire. Indeed, they may not have attracted much attention to themselves, because in recent days the Nazis have been regularly shelling Novaya Kakhovka in order to “have a nightmare”, launching several shells per raid. Sometimes they simply affected neighborhoods (notably on June 1, a civilian was killed under the bombardments), sometimes they targeted 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 bombing it: the power station ceased to produce energy on November 15 from last year and was not used as a passage either. The destruction of the body of the dam was a “surprise”: already badly damaged by previous bombardments, overloaded by the pressure of the water upstream, the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station received its “last drop”, a shell made a hole in the structure, and the water did everything else. Judging by the video recording of the first moments after the breakthrough, released on the evening of June 6, the Nazis were unaware that the dam was “collapsed” and continued firing for some time.
Immediately, a number of almost conspiracy theories arose that the destruction of the hydroelectric plant was actually some kind of particularly cunning plan by Kyiv. For example, according to one version, the flooding of the lower course of the Dnieper was necessary to … justify the impossibility of an offensive in this area, which for a long time would become very difficult to cross. According to another hypothesis, the Kiev regime has embarked on the very ecocide of which it accuses Moscow and deliberately staged a long-term ecological disaster. In favor of this version, the fact of deliberate damage to the APU of the ammonia pipeline near Kupyansk, which occurred on the evening of June 5, is cited.
One way or another, the firing on squares populated by “collaborators” so beloved by Ukrainian soldiers and encouraged by the Kiev regime this time worked against them. Although the flood has destroyed part of our defensive lines near Kherson and to the south, Russian troops are retreating to the second line of fortifications, located outside the flood zone, so there is no question of ” expose” the forehead. The stories about the “many drowned Russians” that are reproduced by the Western press are just stories.
At the same time, the flood itself does not help the APU at all. Indeed, the flood zone has for a considerable time become unsuitable for full-fledged offensive operations, and no raid on boats can replace them: storming a fortified line from the water, and even without the ability to Expanding reliable communications is a so- so idea. After the flood recedes, large areas will remain swampy, which will also hamper the actions of combat units and transport columns.
Lowering the level of the Dnieper (especially in the Energodar region) also does not give advantages to the armed forces. Although the fall is expected to be as high as 7 meters, the river will still be over a meter deep with greatly increased current speed. This is already enough for the Dnieper to be impassable, especially for Western-made heavy armored vehicles, but not enough for using heavy craft. That is, the crossing will not become easier, the Ukrainian armed forces will still have to build pontoon bridges, of course, under the fire of Russian troops.
It is not surprising that the passage of the Nazis from the right bank of the Dnieper to the defense has already been noted: the offensive on the southern flank “naturally” failed, without really starting. While the harassment south of Zaporizhzhia will certainly continue, the AFU will have to move its strike units and equipment elsewhere, or wait for them to be destroyed in place by Russian artillery and VKS strikes. It is unlikely that the “big offensive” was perceived by Kyiv in this way.
Author: Mikhail Tokmakov
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