The specter of a possible attack on the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant, located in the Kherson region and fed by a dam in the middle of the huge Dnieper River, hovers over Ukraine this week. First, Russia justified the evacuation of four towns on the west bank of the river and the city of Kherson earlier in the week by warning that the Ukrainian army had plans to blow up the plant, something that Western analysts interpreted as a way to prepare the ground. for a false flag attack. Two days later, Kyiv resumed the threat but pointed to the Russian forces.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned in his television address last night that Russian forces had planted explosives inside the huge dam located near the town of Nova Kakhovka and which holds back a huge reservoir (2,155 square kilometers) that supplies water to the southern Ukraine, including Crimea. And they plan to blow it up to cover their retreat, in the face of advancing Ukrainian forces, who are preparing to expel Moscow's troops from Kherson in one of the most important battles of the war.
For all these reasons, the president asked the West to prevent such a calamity that he compared to the use of weapons of mass destruction. "Now everyone in the world must act strongly and quickly to prevent a new Russian terrorist attack. Destroying the dam would mean a large-scale disaster," he noted. As a consequence of its destruction, the water supply from the Dnieper River to Crimea would be affected, since the Crimean North Canal, which carries water from the reservoir to the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014, "will simply disappear," he added.
The Ukrainian president's notice was not new. The general who leads the Russian Army in Ukraine, Sergei Surovikin, had already earlier this week accused Kyiv of doing the same and pointed to the Ukrainian forces as being behind the US-supplied Himars missile attack on the Antonivski Bridge, another river crossing nearby and key in the region. At the same time, the pro-Russian authorities began the evacuation of up to 60,000 people from the side where the Ukrainian army is advancing towards Crimea or Kranodar. Moscow's arguments were interpreted by Ukrainian officials as a sign that their enemy was planning to blow up the dam and blame Kyiv. A theory supported by Western analysts.
"The Kremlin could try to take advantage of a false flag attack to overshadow the news of a third humiliating withdrawal (after Kyiv and its outskirts and Kharkiv) for Russian forces, this time from west of Kherson," experts say the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW). An attack of this magnitude would also contribute to fueling "Russian propaganda that presents Ukraine as a terrorist state that deliberately attacks civilians," they add.
The Kremlin-affiliated newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda claimed that the explosion of the dam would trigger a 5-meter-high wave that would sweep through all the villages along the Dnieper River at a speed of 25 km per hour. Within two hours, the water would have reached the city of Jershon and flooded vast areas.
So far neither side has presented evidence to back up their accusations.
The vast Dnipro bisects Ukraine and is several kilometers wide in places. Bursting the dam could send a surge of water flooding the towns below it, including much of the city of Kherson, the country's second largest city and one of the first to be controlled by the Russians at the start of the invasion. It is also the capital of one of the four regions that Russia annexed last month in a move that Kyiv and the West consider illegal.
