The Russians mined the dam and the units of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station in order to “stage another operation under a false flag – to carry out a terrorist attack and blame it on Ukraine,” said President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky during yesterday’s address to the European Council.
“Russia is deliberately creating the basis for a large-scale disaster in the south of Ukraine. We have information that Russian terrorists mined the dam and units of the Kakhovka hydroelectric plant. This is one of the larger power facilities. The dam of this hydropower plant holds about 18 million cubic meters of water. If Russian terrorists blow up this dam, more than 80 settlements, including Kherson, will be in the zone of rapid flooding. Hundreds of thousands of people may be affected,” the President said.
In addition, he explained, this terrorist attack will destroy the water supply of a large part of the south of Ukraine, and will also leave the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant without water for cooling, which comes from the Kakhovka Reservoir. In general, according to Zelensky, “the devastating ecological, humanitarian, man-made consequences of this single Russian terrorist attack may become such that it will be called a historical catastrophe.”
According to the information in hands of the Ukrainian President, everything has already been prepared for this terrorist attack. “It is necessary to act immediately so that Russia does not have the opportunity to make this catastrophe come to life,” Zelensky urged the European Council.
One of the possible goals of the terrorist attack on the Kakhovka HPP is to flood the territory in order to stop the advance of the Ukrainian army and cut off the retreat routes for the occupiers, Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the Office of the President, wrote on Twitter.
The American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) also does not rule out the undermining of the Kakhovka HPP dam and the flooding of a part of the Kherson Oblast. “The Russian authorities are probably creating informational conditions to justify planned Russian retreats and significant losses of territory in the Kherson Oblast. […] Russian forces are also setting information conditions to conduct a false-flag attack on the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP). The Russian military may believe that breaching the dam could cover their retreat from the right bank of the Dnipro River and prevent or delay Ukrainian advances across the river,” according to ISW analysts.
