Did Russians blow up the dam in Ukraine?
An OSINT group alleges they did it as an attempt to stop a Ukrainian offensive.
Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.
Yesterday, I wrote about the insanity of the Russian propaganda campaign around who destroyed the Kakhovka dam that has catastrophically flooded the Kherson region of Ukraine.
I wrote that a Russian group that works with open-source intelligence (OSINT), the Conflict Intelligence Team, said that it’s possible the Russians hadn’t directly targeted the dam, but that it collapsed due to the criminal negligence of the occupying authorities.
Somebody certainly did something, I said, whether that was target the dam or allow it to fall due to severe neglect — which is against the Geneva Conventions, and I don’t think it takes a genius to figure out who, exactly, destroyed thousands of livelihoods and set off what President Volodymyr Zelensky called “an environmental bomb of mass destruction.”
The following was released today from a UK-based OSINT organization called Molfar. The English is rough, but the meaning is clear enough: The group is alleging that the dam was broken because the Russians set off mines while increasing the dam’s water pressure, making for a massive breach. They’ve compiled a lot of known information, such as the fact that Russians rigged the dam with explosives in November, according to the Russians themselves, Molfar says. The group’s conclusions:
The flooding of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant [HPP] occurred because the Russians occupied it from the first days of the full-scale invasion and had uninterrupted access to it. Then they mined it, and then deliberately increased the water pressure, which led to the destruction of the dam and its supports. As a result, they destroyed the dam.
The Russian leadership knew about the planning of the terrorist attack and the approaching disaster and prepared the legislative basis [sic] for itself. Why is it beneficial for the Russians to blow up the dam — to slow down the offensive of the Armed Forces — the occupation military correspondents themselves said. And also the fact that the dam was not destroyed by the Armed Forces, because the Ukrainian military was not ready to blow up the dam — this is confirmed by the occupiers with their slanderous theses.
Currently, it is still difficult to analyze the explosion of the Kakhovka HPP completely in the historical context to understand the cause-and-effect relationships. But let’s remember that armies that go on the offensive do not blow up dams to block their way to advance. Instead, it is the retreating armies that take such actions to slow down the other side's advance.
That last paragraph, in which the destruction of the dam is directly related to the possibility of slowing down the Ukrainian counteroffensive is debatable. My Ukrainian source told me that the Dnipro River had been a big enough obstacle even before the dam collapsed — which means the possibility of a Ukrainian military advance has always been limited. And, most important, there’s no evidence that Ukrainian forces have been planning any offensive in the area.
While there is no direct evidence that explosives at the dam were set off by the Russians, this evaluation gives a step-by-step explanation of why that is a strong possibility.
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It is so hard to know what to believe these days, and getting harder. I like that the BBC have a Reality Check service. The challenge is that disinformation is a standard tool in times of war (and peace) and the people who serve it up are often very good at their work. Social media can help, but even there, agents deliberately or accidentally serve up fake news. World leaders have been known to serve up disinformation and that's putting it mildly.
How about testimony from two Russian soldiers who were in the engineering batallion station in Kherson. They explained in a video that they were assigned temporarily to the unit stationed at the Kakhovka dam for almost a year. Their job was to wire all the explosives needed to blow the dam when word came from the kremlin. Others in their unit were busy doing the same thing at the Zaparesia nuke plant on the Reservoir to the north east. one other clue is that any army engineer corps member can tell you that a hydro plan with sluice stanchions anchored in 20 + feet of water at the base of tehsluice gates cannot be damaged to that extent over 300 feet of stanchions blown away, not with a rocket ot Himar. it must be done from the inside and with specific explosives where they can do that type of damage. Putin is just worried that he will have another major war crime added to his list. Himmler, the Nazi war criminal who 70 years earlier enacted a scorched policy against the Ukrainians in WWII as he was forced back into Germany by the Russians retaking Ukraine {again] knew they could only hang him once at Nuremberg. so like Putin he was not deterred by a global court of justice