This is going to be a short one, but it’s the most interesting thing happening in the war right now.
The main action occurring at the moment is in the southern front,
where Ukraine has been making slow but steady progress.
Ukraine’s short-term goal is to recapture Kherson,
the major city Russia has controlled west of the Dnipro River since the early phase of the war.
Thus far, Ukraine’s main advances have been much further northeast.
But everyone knows that this is a steady march toward the city.
Russian troops are vulnerable because Kherson only has three routes for resupply.
There’s the Antonivsky Bridge, the main vehicle roadway in and out of the city.
There’s this rail bridge a little further upriver, which is important because much of
the heavy military equipment Russia wants to deploy to Kherson would come via rail.
Then there’s a final bridge—less convenient but
still useful if necessary to Russia—much further upstream in Nova Kakhovka.
If these sound familiar to you, it is because we previously
covered why they were an integral part of Ukraine’s counterattack up north.
Ukraine has been peppering each of the bridges with a steady
dose of HIMARS rockets to prevent rapid passage across any of them
That forced Russia
To proactively deploy its troops and equipment to Kherson, otherwise
Ukraine could directly attack it without Russia having sufficient time to respond.
But doing so left the north wide open,
which is how Ukraine made such stunning advances in early September.
To be more precise, Ukraine was not blowing up its
own infrastructure to the same degree as the attack on the Crimean Bridge.
In fact, the level of precision of artillery fire directed at Nova Kakhovka is impressive.
You see, the bridge is also the site of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant.
It’s a dam that uses the flow of the Dnipro River to produce electricity.
Given Russia’s focus on attacking and controlling Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure—
the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant the best-known example of that—
Ukraine did not want to destroy the bridge, and thus the dam, and thus the electricity generation.
However, there is more to it than that.
If you destroy the dam, then the flood plain of the Dnipro River will … flood.
How bad the consequences would be depends on the flow of the river. But suffice it
to say that the water line will be measured in meters and the economic
damage would be nothing short of catastrophic.
Consequently, when Ukraine was “destroying” the bridge months ago,
it was actually targeting this very specific area,
which can disrupt traffic while not breaking the dam.
I think it is worth a moment to reflect on just how remarkable this is:
Ukraine is confident enough in the precision of its artillery
to hit here
but not here.
But now all of the conversation has turned to the destruction of the dam. Russia is claiming that
Ukraine is planning to target it, ostensibly in support of the impending counterattack on Kherson.
Meanwhile, Zelensky released a video warning of a Russian false
flag operation to destroy the dam and pin responsibility on Ukraine.
Around the same time, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu called his counterparts in the
United States, United Kingdom,
France, and Turkey
to discuss concerns that Ukraine was planning to detonate a “dirty” bomb
in Ukrainian territory and blame it on Russia.
Dirty bombs use nuclear material like uranium in a conventional explosion.
Better yet, you can use nuclear waste from a reactor, and then
you aren’t throwing away otherwise valuable uranium in a dirty bomb.
They do not create a mushroom cloud or an actual nuclear reaction,
but they would cause radiation to spread.
The western response was that Russia was setting up a false-false flag:
Russia may be creating a situation where it denotates a bomb to make it look like
Ukraine detonated a bomb to make it look like
Russia detonated a bomb. And, yes, this makes my head hurt too.
Anyway, back to the dam, regardless of who might be responsible for the dam’s destruction,
the military consequences are the same:
it will make operating in the area substantially more difficult,
effectively erecting a wall that isolates each side of the Dnipro River.
The Ukrainian motivation for doing that is a stretch. The benefits are small.
It would only help Ukraine tactically if it happens before the counterattack begins to
(a) prevent resupply and
(b) trap Russian troops in Kherson.
If preventing resupply was the goal,
Ukraine should have done that a long time ago. So swing and a miss there.
Trapping Russian troops is a mixed bag. Backed into a corner,
they will fight harder, which means higher Ukrainian casualties.
On the other hand, it would give Ukraine an opportunity to remove
those troops and materiel from the battlefield permanently.
If Ukraine thinks that they will eventually have to fight those troops at some point otherwise,
then these might be Ukraine’s most favorable terms to do it.
The problem here is that Russia has been making substantial troop movements within the area.
A plausible interpretation of this is that Russia’s experience troops are exhausted.
Russia is now cycling them out in favor of freshly mobilized soldiers.
Those fresh, poorly trained replacements cannot hold the
city. This is essentially Russia waving a white flag on Kherson.
Perhaps Russian leadership knows that the city is a lost cause
and want to save their battle-hardened veterans for a more productive purpose.
So the new troops go in to hold the city for as long as it is feasible.
But that means Ukraine would be targeting the least valuable soldiers imaginable,
so removing them from the battlefield is not as helpful as it appears.
And all of that would come at a ridiculously high humanitarian price tag.
Kherson was Ukraine’s before the invasion began,
and one imagines that Kyiv wants it to be functional after the war.
The costs swamp the benefits, which is why it would be perplexing if Ukraine hit the dam.
On the flip side, Russia can see a clear incentive to flood the area once it abandons Kherson.
After Russia retreats over the Dnipro,
Ukraine will be tempted to pursue to continue the counterattack.
Put simply, flooding the area cuts off Ukraine’s ability to do that.
This is consistent with historical precedents for destroying dams in warfare.
Chinese Nationalists destroyed Yellow River levees to stop advancing Japanese troops.
During World War II, the Soviet Union destroyed a dam in Zaporizhzhia to slow German troops.
By the end of the war, the roles reversed,
with Germany again blasting the dam this time to prevent Soviet troops from advancing.
Back to today, Russia’s central vulnerability during the counterattack
has been trying to defend a front line of 1000 kilometers with limited manpower.
The whole point of Putin’s mobilization announcement
in September was to shore up that problem.
Shrinking the front line, even if for a short period of time, would also help.
Ukraine might have to take its counterattack to Zaporizhzhia instead.
In the meantime, Russia can point its artillery into the newly recaptured Kherson.
The false flag operation also gives Putin political cover within Russia.
Outside the country, few are going to believe that Ukraine destroyed its own dam.
But Moscow more tightly controls the narrative fed to the Russian masses.
Remember: Kherson, by Russian law, is now a part of Russia’s inalienable territory.
The environmental disaster serves as excuse for the retreat: Russia simply cannot hold onto the
territory as long as Ukraine is going to resort to such actions. Or at least that’s the spin.
The economic harm it causes to Ukraine here is just a bonus.
That said, the saving grace for those downstream might be this over to the side.
It’s the start of the North Crimean Canal. No dam, no flow, no freshwater for the Crimean Peninsula.
If Russia keeps the dam standing, then Crimea’s water supply may be the explanation.
After all, Crimean freshwater was one of the 12 causes of the war we discussed a long time ago.
And that’s Ukraine’s dam problem. What do you think will happen? Let me know in the comments.
If you want to know more about the origins of the war, you can always read my book on the subject.
Check below for more information on that.
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