Yesterday, the peak was reached in the water level in the Ukrainian region of Kherson after the destruction – on Monday night – of the Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric plant, in the lower reaches of the great Dnieper river. The level should start to drop today (calculation is three days). However, the flood could last for ten days, and rain is expected for the weekend. There are at least 80 localities affected, including some neighborhoods of the city of Kherson, and about 5,000 flooded buildings on both banks, 2,700 of which in the area under occupation of the Russian army, on the south bank of the river, according to the Russian agency Tass.
Evacuations continued yesterday, while concern grew over the lack of drinking water in the area and the likely contamination due to the flooding of sewers and drains, not to mention chemical spills. One of the first warnings was from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who noted that 150 tons of heavy oil from the hydroelectric plant’s machinery had ended up in the river, and there is a danger of spilling 300 tons month.
Mine pollution will be even worse. Russians and Ukrainians planted their respective banks of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines that can now reappear any day anywhere. Thus, the international demining organization Halo Trust explained that it is working next to the Inhulets River – in an area of ​​Kherson recovered by Ukrainian troops – which has received an avenue of water from the overflow of the Dnieper. Now there is no way to locate the artifacts.
But the biggest impact will be on Ukrainian agriculture, which will suffer first from the flood and then from the drought. According to official sources, 31 irrigation canal systems of a thousand kilometers would have been lost, 30% in the Dnipro region, 74% in Zaporizhzhya and 94% in Kherson, where about 10,000 hectares of crops have been denied. In total, between 200,000 and half a million hectares will be affected by the lack of water, which include fields of cereal, sunflowers (Ukraine is a large producer of oil) and vegetables in general. All this, just before summer.
The history of the last months of the war shows to what extent the dam was a sensitive infrastructure.
On February 6, the huge Kakhovka reservoir – where the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant is located – registered its lowest level in thirty years. Dead fish began to appear on the banks. It was then speculated that the Russians, who were in control of the dam (the only one of the six in the entire course of the Dnieper from the border with Belarus), were keeping the floodgates open to reduce the flow to the mentioned irrigators.
Then the thaw began and the spring rains came. On May 15, satellite images showed how the water overflowed over the dam and the inhabited islets in the reservoir began to disappear. On June 2 and 3, the road that runs over the dam appeared seriously damaged and washed away by the water.
It is known that as of November 11, 2022, some sluice gates of the dike were blocked, apparently due to damage, such as the road, a route used by the Russians during their retreat from the northern bank of the Kherson region , pursued by Ukrainian forces. The structure suffered impacts from projectiles or the effect of explosives.
In this situation, in which a large volume of water presses on a concrete and earth dam that is not in the best condition, with a strong flow through only a few sluice gates, progressive and fatal erosion is possible. “It can be interpreted that only by causing an opening at the top could the dam collapse. A large explosion was unnecessary”, said an expert in hydraulic engineering consulted by this newspaper. In this regard, David Helms, a retired meteorologist from the US Air Force and a regular consultant on aspects of the war in Ukraine, has pointed out that “the fact that Russia did not open more floodgates during the peak spring flow is the cause probable”.
However, according to experts quoted by The New York Times, it was an explosion inside the hydroelectric plant. This was stated by the director of the company Ukrhidroenergo, Ihor Sirota, who ruled out an impact from the outside. Mikhaïl Podoliak, an adviser to President Zelenski, claimed that the explosion was carried out by the 205th Cossack Motorized Rifle Brigade of the Russian Army.
Whether it was deliberate negligence that led to the disaster or whether there was an explosion, the timing could not have been more opportune, at the start of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. It is significant that the head of the pro-Russian administration of the occupied Kherson region, Vladimir Saldo, said that after the break of the dam “the operational-tactical situation had developed in favor of the forces of the Russian Federation”. Saldo did not elaborate, but could refer to the fact that the Russians suspected a Ukrainian attempt to break through to the other side of the Dnieper. As an ambassador from an unidentified European country said in Washington, “everything that was planned downstream of the dam will probably have to be rescheduled.”
Meanwhile, the head of the British Foreign Office, James Cleverly, refused to comment on the authorship of the destruction of the dam when asked by AFP after an OECD meeting in Paris. “We will not express ourselves until we have all the elements (of information) available; therefore, we will err on the side of caution, in this story,†said Cleverly.
For his part, Vladimir Putin accused the West of “making a dangerous bet in escalating hostilities, committing war crimes, openly using terrorist methods and organizing sabotage on Russian territory”.
According to the Kremlin, the Russian president made this statement while speaking by phone with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, adding that “a clear example is the act of barbaric destruction” of the Kakhovka dam, “which leads to a large-scale environmental and humanitarian catastropheâ€.
