Not seeing this talked about here much. Russia are saying Ukraine exploded their own dam, and Ukraine are of course blaming Russia.
Very strange. I hold the opinion that the nordstream explosion wasn’t Russia. I’m not sure where I sit with this one. It seems weird for Russia to straight up deny something that can be very easily proven. At the same time though, Putin could just be being brazen because it doesn’t seem like the world is realistically too concerned with stopping him.
this article is from last December
Russia had to arm and feed its forces via three crossings: the Antonovsky Bridge, the Antonovsky railway bridge and the Nova Kakhovka dam, part of a hydroelectric facility with a road running on top of it.
The two bridges were targeted with U.S.-supplied M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems — or HIMARS launchers, which have a range of 50 miles — and were quickly rendered impassable.
“There were moments when we turned off their supply lines completely, and they still managed to build crossings,” Kovalchuk said. “They managed to replenish ammunition. … It was very difficult.” Kovalchuk considered flooding the river. The Ukrainians, he said, even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages.
The test was a success, Kovalchuk said, but the step remained a last resort. He held off.
They talked about it in the news thread
Everything leaks :rocz-yes:
It’s being talked about plenty in the news mega. I personally think that the dam was damaged by previous Ukrainian artillery shelling (featuring previous wunderwaffen HIMARS). This damaged the structure of the dam as well as some the floodgates, limiting the maximum outflow of the dam. Russia couldn’t (or didn’t) maintain or repair the dam because of the shelling and because Ukraine threatens death to collaborators and their families. Ukraine then opened up the floodgates on the dams upriver of the Kherson dam, this caused the water level to rise on the dam reservoir, which Russia couldn’t drain because Ukraine had earlier used artillery and HIMARS to take out some of the flood gates. This combination of high water levels, damaged floodgates, and lack of maintenance caused the dam to fail.
The previous artillery bombardments by Ukraine is confirmed by western sources. Somebody else posted the Washington Post article but there were other incidents as well. I haven’t seen any convincing evidence of an explosion right before the dam failure so I’m assuming it didn’t happen. The draining of dams upriver is currently internet rumors, I haven’t seen solid evidence of that happening yet but I believe it. There is evidence of the water levels rising massively before the dam failure. It could theoretically just be heavy spring rains that caused it. So this my working theory but I’m waiting for more evidence to come out to say for certain.
Edit: I probably should mention that Russia at one point did detonate an explosive on the dam in order to demolish the road. This shouldn’t have affected the actual dam, if the demolition was done properly.
