Recently, Russia has undertaken an interesting strategy that hints at
its next plans for the invasion of Ukraine.
However, as far as I can tell, it has received almost no coverage from Western media.
NPR first reported it,
then Newsweek cited a Ukrainian government release,
and then the International Atomic Energy Agency expressed concerned,
which should give you a sense of the gravity of the situation.
But no one seems to be covering the deeper strategic implications:
namely, that Russia likely has a manpower problem.
It all revolves around the Kakhovka Dam and Reservoir. And if you lend me a moment of your
time, I will try to convince you that this is extremely important for what will happen next.
If you have heard of this dam before,
it is likely because it was a focal point of Ukraine’s Kherson counteroffensive.
It is one of the three crossings of the Dnipro near Kherson City. Back during the summer of 2022,
Ukraine kept a steady dose of HIMARS rockets targeting these bridges,
so as to restrict Russian troop movements.
This created a manpower deficit up north,
allowing Ukraine to push further away from Kharkiv in September.
And eventually, by November, it forced Russia to withdraw from Kherson City without a battle.
That takes us to today’s important events, still back at the dam.
Also beginning in November 2022—and continuing at least through February
2023—Russia opened some sluices and released water from the dam.
Over that period, the water level in the reservoir behind it dropped from 16 meters to 13.83 meters.
We know Russia is responsible for the drop because the roadway that
runs along the top of the dam is destroyed.
Russia did this during its November retreat
but simultaneously was careful not to damage the dam itself.
As a result, the frontlines have a clear division,
with Ukraine west of the dam and Russia east of it.
The dam’s sluices are open on the Russian side but not on the Ukrainian side,
meaning that this order came from Moscow.
On the surface level—and yes, I just made a
water pun—the reason why Russia might want to do this is straightforward.
Releasing water from the dam lowers the reservoir
but raises the water level on the other side, expanding the river in the process.
When Russia began raising water, Ukraine had the initiative along the southern front.
Rising waters limit Ukraine’s ability to exploit that.
The higher the water is, the harder it is for troops to cross,
whether because boats take more time and therefore draw more enemy fire
or because the pontoon bridges need to be longer.
You might recall that Ukraine adopted this same strategy at the beginning of the war, releasing
the Irpin River dam to have the Kyiv Reservoir flood potential invasion paths to the capital.
The difference back down south is that the active battle in Kherson has died down,
to the point where Zelensky has taken a trip there,
with the front line becoming a more or less stagnant.
In other words, flooding the river plain is a proactive strategy for Russia. Why do that?
Well, if the Dnipro River is harder to cross,
Russia can afford to redeploy troops from the Kherson theatre and into the norther theatres.
Conceivably, the benefit here is to aid the much-heralded Russian winter offensive.
And if this is where the story ended,
it would be bad news for Ukraine. The rising waters would just represent an
environmental catastrophe within its borders to support a Russian attack.
However, there may be a silver lining for Ukraine here. If you look at who
bears the costs of flooding right now, it is mostly in Russian-held territory.
By itself, that would not be much consolation to Ukraine,
given that Kyiv has eyes to take back that land. But let’s look at the damage for a second.
It includes the direct flooding that has captured our attention thus far,
but also lost irrigation to the southeast,
and a nuclear dilemma that has the IAEA’s attention to the northeast.
As a starting point, let’s zoom out from the dam.
Near Kherson City, under normal times, the green space is south of the river.
That is because, correspondingly, the flood plain is mostly to the south.
Thus, when the dam’s sluices go up,
water levels do indeed rise on both banks of the river, as illustrated earlier.
However, Ukrainian-held territory will only see a fraction of that rise.
Instead, given the status quo, Russia is going
to bear the majority of the land-use problems that come with the flooding.
And as the citizens near the Irpin River know, the water might take years to fully recede.
Heading back to the dam, the second problem Russia
faces is with the irrigation that was central to its original construction.
This line here coming out of the reservoir is the North Crimean Canal.
Completed at the end of 1975, the canal draws water from the
Dnipro River and transports it all the way to the peninsula.
It is also one of the substantive causes of the war:
back in 2014, Ukraine dammed the canal to cut off Crimea’s water supply,
drying out the many crop fields that fueled the peninsula’s economy.
This was the best sanction that Ukraine could muster to respond to Russia’s annexation of the
territory, given the rest of the chaos going on in the country at the time.
Back to today, in the opening thrust of the current war, Russia destroyed the canal dam,
allowing water to flow back to Crimea.
But for the canal to draw any water whatsoever,
you need to have a high water level back at the Kakhovka Dam for it to fill here.
And since Russia opened the Kakhovka Dam, the canal has been drying up.
To make matters worse, the canal also irrigates crops through aqueducts that extend outward,
before the canal even reaches the peninsula.
Consequently, crops will fail in the area in between as well.
This is why Ukraine did not simply shut off the canal at the source nine years
ago: it wanted to harm Russia’s agricultural output, not its own.
The third problem is much further up the river, potentially more dangerous by a significant
margin, and something we have covered before. It is the Zaporzhzhia nuclear power plant.
These are nuclear fuel rods, the key component to electricity production.
Spent nuclear fuel rods must spend years in cooling pools
to release all of their decay heat and prevent them from seeping radiation.
Cool water goes in, absorbs the heat, warm water goes out,
and the cycle continues for a decade or more.
This is why you find nuclear reactors next to bodies of water:
they need a source for their cooling pools.
But as you have likely guessed, in addition to all the other problems with the power plant,
opening the dam’s sluices has lowered the water level all the way upstream in Zaporizhzhia.
Regarding the IAEA’s warning, the water levels are not a problem…yet.
The power plant keeps its supply pond higher than the river,
giving the cooling pools some wiggle room.
But if levels drop by just another two-thirds of a meter,
then the power plant will need to implement some sort of emergency solution.
And a further meter past that could cause irreversible ecological damage
regardless of what is going on at a nuclear power plant.
Pulling these three points together, it might just sound like Russia is destroying
Ukrainian infrastructure and land to raise the chances that Moscow’s counterattack succeeds.
Bad for Kyiv. Good for Moscow.
Or so it seems. But it is not that simple.
Remember, the area that Ukraine controls is only marginally affected.
This also perhaps hints at why the draining has not received much news attention:
this is the only place Western journalists have easy access to.
The areas directly south of Kherson City,
the nuclear power plant, the farms along the canal,
and of course Crimea itself are all controlled by Russia.
And by the Russian law signed here, those Russian-held parts are actually part of Russia,
just as much as Moscow or St. Petersburg. As far as anyone can tell, Moscow’s long-term plan is
to possess and profit from these areas. From this perspective, draining the river is self-sabotage.
Which leaves us to wonder why. These are obvious problems for any military planner,
so it is unlikely that Russia is simply blundering again.
Instead, the logical explanation is that Russia is still facing a manpower shortage.
The argument here is simple.
If the Kremlin believed that troops were plentiful for the winter campaign up north,
Russia would not be paying a high cost to divert resources from Kherson.
That is to say, despite the outward appearances otherwise, this is good news for Kyiv.
But before anyone there begins to celebrate, this comes with some caveats.
First, recall how the reservoir draining began back in November
2022. It just took a while for the consequences to become obvious.
What we might be seeing now is the after effects of a Russian stop-gap measure from long ago.
In other words, Russia had manpower issues. But
that was at the end of 2022. Today is a different story.
It may be the case that Putin’s mobilization from this September announcement eventually
solved the problem. Russia just needed to construct a metaphorical bridge to get there.
If that is correct, then what we are seeing at Kakhovka was good news for Ukraine at a
time when no one publicly realized it. Now, it is effectively meaningless.
There is also the possibility that, manpower issues or not,
Russia has a strategy in the Donbas that justifies the sacrifice down south.
Getting to that magical three-to-one troop advantage may just be taking a
little more for Russia than it ordinarily should.
If so, dead crops in Russian-controlled territory
are little consolation to Ukraine if it means further loss of territory elsewhere.
However, the optimistic interpretation for Kyiv
is that the Russian offensive is just not what has been advertised,
and that Russia is ostensibly paying the bulk of the costs because the Kremlin does
not anticipate holding onto the territory for much longer anyway.
We have discussed before that the entire winter narrative has been a puzzle—
whether this is a stalemate, a basic winter slowdown,
Ukraine is quietly baiting Russia,
or that we are witnessing the beginnings of a true Russian offensive.
But every day that goes by where Russia is not making major gains—
or even deploying at a level of troops that could plausibly make those gains happen—
suggests that Russia’s winter offensive was simply dead on arrival.
To be clear, no one should be drawing that conclusion quite yet,
but it is something that will hover over the front lines for the weeks to come.
After all, a few months from now, it is plausible that we will be talking about
how this was Russia’s clever redeployment strategy that led to a breakthrough.
If you want to know more about the invasion,
you will love my book that examines the causes of it. Check below for more information on that.
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share, and subscribe, and I will see you next time. Take care.
I use this photo a bunch. It is one of my favorite photos of Zelensky,
because it was taken right before he ditched the suit for his informal war attire.
But I recently realized that it also perfectly encapsulates Boris
Johnson’s personality. That tie is all over the place.