The Nova Kakhovka dam is no more.
Prior to June 6, 2023, the dam sat at a critical strategic junction.
We have been discussing the issues surrounding it for the last eight months,
and so today’s video will be a quick update on how it will affect the war,
with a focus on four consequences:
humanitarian problems for those downriver, the impediments it creates for Ukraine’s
counteroffensive, the situation over
at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, and the water situation over in Crimea.
But we begin with the more pressing humanitarian concerns.
Mostly, this is the flooding that the areas downriver experienced
immediately following the dam’s destruction.
Take a look at the satellite shot from a distance.
The dam is over here, Kherson City is here,
and the line of control at the time of the dam’s destruction is the river flowing east to west,
with Ukraine controlling north of the line, and Russia controlling south of it.
The natural coloration tells you what you need
to know about which side of the river is most affected.
Kherson City, to the north, is on relative high ground.
Russian-controlled areas to the south are swampy. They are at a lower elevation,
so they take the brunt of the flooding.
The good news here is that fewer people live on the southern side.
Also good news is that it took about eight hours for water levels to peak downstream,
giving some forewarning for evacuations.
The bad news is that the flooding will not go away anytime soon.
As we have discussed before, way further up north, Ukraine blew
the Irpin River Dam at the beginning of the invasion to stall Russia’s advance.
More than a year later, residents in the flood plain are still recovering.
Back down south, the problem is worse than it would appear.
These parts of the dam are called sluices.
Essentially, they are gigantic gates that the dam operator can use to control water flow.
Despite the dam dividing the line of control, Russia determined the sluices’ positions.
Three months ago, the most recent time we visited the dam,
Russia had left one of the sluices down to lower the reservoir’s level to
about here,
with speculation that the goal was to increase the Dnipro’s
width downriver without causing major flooding.
As a result, the water level upstream had fallen to a record low 14 meters.
But Russia then closed the sluices and kept them sealed tight.
Combined with winter snowfall,
then spring melt and showers, and the water level rose to a record 17.5 meters.
In other words, just prior to the dam’s destruction,
Russia operated the dam in such a way to make the flooding the worst it possibly could be.
There is also the long-term electrical consequence.
The dam was a hydroelectric power plant, generating 357 megawatts.
That means the power for hundreds of thousands of homes has gone off the grid forever.
But that is a problem for future Ukraine.
The more pressing issue is how the dam’s destruction affects the military balance.
A running theme we have covered in recent videos is how Russia
must allocate its defensive resources given Ukraine’s upcoming counterattack.
The central goal is to even out all of Russia’s vulnerabilities so that there
is no obvious location for Ukraine to exploit.
But the long-running problem that the Kremlin had was a manpower shortage.
This mobilization announcement from September 2022 had mitigated some of the problem.
However, losses from the winter Bakhmut campaign and elsewhere,
combined with partisan warfare incursions near Belgorod
and the redeployments necessary to stop them,
have left Russia hungry for warm bodies.
The flooding helps resolve that problem.
It adds a natural barrier that will slow Ukrainian counterattacks across the river,
especially as Russia destroyed Kherson’s other river crossings during its November 2022 retreat.
With Russia’s ability to win in Kherson naturally higher,
that frees up soldiers to move to other locations that are naturally more vulnerable.
The timing of this does not seem like a coincidence:
there were many whispers on June 5,
just one day before the anniversary of D-Day,
that Ukraine had begun multiple probing runs, signaling that a counteroffensive was starting.
The main concern for outsiders, however, is the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
It is situated upstream from the dam and is the biggest nuclear power plant in all of Europe.
To wit, its 5700 MW capacity puts the dam’s hydroelectric plant to shame.
Russia occupied it at the start of the war.
A nuclear power plant in a conflict zone caused enough concern that the
International Atomic Energy Agency and other watchdogs recommended that it go offline.
In September 2022, the reactors indeed went into shutdown mode,
meaning that they stopped producing new heat.
However, residual heat lasts for years, both for the reactors
and the cooling pools of spent fuel like these that are also housed on site.
Consequently, the power plant needs a constant
stream of water to prevent a radiation from leaking.
The problem is that the river is the source of that water,
and the dam was responsible for maintaining the necessary water level.
According to the IAEA report produced immediately after the dam’s destruction,
if the water level drops to 12.7 meters, the pumps stop working.
That is the bad news. The good news is that they saw this coming.
Operators can over-pump water into cooling channels so that there is a reserve supply.
Meanwhile, the power plant has a cooling pond
designed to stay above the river’s water level as a safety precaution.
Combine this with how the generators have been on a sustained shutdown,
and the IAEA estimates that the existing water will last for months.
Thus, there is plenty of time to find longer-term solutions.
In turn, we are not looking at a Chernobyl or Fukushima-level incident.
But don’t rest too easy. The power plant is still on the front lines.
Indeed, the plant has been struck before. And if the cooling pond were to be hit with a missile
and spring a leak, the problems would be more immediate.
The final consequence worth noting involves the North Crimean Canal.
That is the aqueduct that takes water from the Dnipro River, winds it through
the Kherson oblast, and delivers it all the way to the Crimean Peninsula.
After Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014, Ukraine shut off the water supply.
As you would expect, one of the first things that Russia
did in February 2022 invasion was turn back on the spigots.
However, the dam’s destruction has forever resolved the situation: the canal will run dry.
That is because by blocking the water here,
the dam also supplied the water level necessary to fill the canal here.
Both sides currently claim that the other one was responsible for the dam’s destruction.
But if Russia was responsible, it strongly signals that the Kremlin
is pessimistic about holding the current territorial status quo.
That is because the canal is vital to irrigation, both
within Kherson and in Crimea.
And even if peace were to magically appear tomorrow,
it will be a long time before the water problem is solved.
If you want to know more about the war, you will love my book
that investigates its many possible causes. Check below for more information on that.
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