The fallout from Tuesday’s attack on the Kakhovka dam continues to mount, with the Kremlin characterizing the incident as a “barbaric act” ordered “at the suggestion of [Kiev’s] Western curators,” and a calamity which has unleashed a “large-scale environmental and human disaster.”
A US-based private Earth imaging company released before and after satellite photos showing the consequences of the flooding, with much of the town of Novaya Kakhovka in Russia's Kherson completely submerged in water, together with other settlements on both the Russian and Ukrainian-controlled sides of the river.
A European Space Agency satellite tracking water levels June 5, 6, and 7 showed the extent of the rising water levels across the region over the three days.
Ukrainian and NATO officials quickly blamed Moscow for the disaster, calling it an “ecological catastrophe.” Russia, which has born an equal share of the direct fallout of the flooding, plus the prospects of the loss of water in the North Crimean Canal and cooling water for the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, dismissed the claims, pointing out that Kiev had been attacking the Kakhovka hydroplant and its environs for well over a year before Tuesday morning’s fatal blow.
Scorched Earth Tactics
The Kakhovka dam attack is another example of the Zelensky regime’s absolute disregard for casualties and destruction in the ongoing NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, and another demonstration of the West’s cynical maxim of "fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian," says prominent Russian military observer Alexey Leonkov.
“When there are no impressive battlefield victories, but one needs to raise the degree of the demonization of Russia, one can really go all out. The regime in Kiev and those who control it do not care whatsoever about what happens to Ukraine in the future, or speaking more precisely, its people. They want to leave for Russia a territory in accordance with scorched earth tactics – destruction, an embittered population, preferably with environmental pollution, radioactive residues or perhaps [the fallout from] biological weapons,” Leonkov, the editor of Arsenal Otechestva, a Russian military affairs magazine, told Sputnik.
Leonkov is convinced that Ukraine’s military and government lack any real independence, and carry out the policy of Western powers paying the bills. Kiev’s patrons are “absolutely uninterested in Ukraine’s lands or the people who live there…They do not care how many people will die, how many cities and villages are destroyed, how many environmental disasters and other calamities they face. They don’t give a damn about it,” the observer said.
For Russia, these same territories are a kind of “shrine,” he said. “These lands were settled and developed by our ancestors. We fought for these lands in two world wars. We are not indifferent to these territories, or the people living there. That’s why we are trying to conduct a military operation, not an all-out war that destroys everything and everyone…Our enemy, and this is clear, consists of [30 countries], all of them members of the NATO bloc. This adversary…has already stated that they will [strive to] realize their goals ‘to the last Ukrainian.’”
Link to Stalled Counteroffensive
Leonkov believes the attack on the Kakhovka dam is linked directly to the failure of Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive, with the flooding of the region giving the Ukrainian military the opportunity to remove troops from the Kherson direction, with the knowledge that Russian forces will have no opportunity to advance.
“I think now they will have the opportunity to gather a much more significant force and try to break through in a certain area. That’s taking into account the fact that they are facing severe limitations in the forces and means available after the work of our aviation in their rear areas through the month of May, which destroyed up to 40 percent of the equipment that was being prepared for the counteroffensive, and 60 percent of their ammunition. It’s obvious now that this equipment and ammunition are no longer available, and won’t appear in short order. But there are also the forces that can be removed from a portion of the front. And now Kherson has become the most suitable area to do so – becoming a water barrier. As long as the flooding continues, no one will storm this barrier,” he said.
Leonkov estimates that the region’s flooding will free up to two brigades of Ukrainian troops.
“We were not preparing to force the Dnepr River in the Kherson region anyway, so they’ve now received a kind of ‘double guarantee.’ We didn’t have any watercraft there to storm Kherson by sea. Furthermore, the right bank of the river [where Ukrainian forces are concentrated] is higher than its left bank. We set up strongholds in the area which, according to intelligence, periodically fired on concentrations of Ukrainian troops. Now it’s clear that we won’t be able to reach them,” the observer said.
Alexander Mikhailov, the head of the Bureau of Political and Military Analysis, a Russian military think tank, echoed Leonkov’s take, telling Sputnik that Kherson’s flooding will give Kiev a two-to-three week window in the course of which they can remove troops from this section of the front.
The attack on the Kakhovka dam also gives Kiev another opportunity for a fresh offensive against Russia on the information front, Mikhailov said.
“This is another label to hang on our country ‘once against committing some kind of crime against humanity,’ a chance to accuse us of blowing up the dam, flooding those territories and endangering thousands of civilians living there. It had been quite predictable since last year that such a scenario would materialize,” Mikhailov said, pointing to Russian warnings at the United Nations about the Kakhovka dam from last October.
Cui Bono?
“When certain events take place along the line of contact, it’s always necessary to look for who benefits. It’s clear that blowing up the Kakhovka [dam] was not beneficial to us, any way you look at it. Even when we left the Kherson bridgehead, we only destroyed the overpass that allowed the station to be used as a kind of transport artery. We destroyed it up in such a manner that it became impossible to rebuild it from the Ukrainian side. At the same time, we did not touch the dam, realizing the consequences of doing so. Because the North Crimean Canal, which feeds Crimea, also takes water from the Kakhovka reservoir. Therefore, lowering its level, the flooding of the Dnepr is absolutely unbeneficial for us,” Leonkov said.
But for the US and its allies, who continue to lose ground in the court of world opinion, the destruction of the Kakhovka dam - and Monday’s sabotage attack against the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline in Kharkov, serve as powerful “arguments which they can use to manipulate the world community,” while taking the pressure off at home as publics ask questions about where the $200 billion sent to Kiev since February 2022 has gone, the observer summed up.