The Russians have changed their strategy. Putin’s forces are now targeting critical infrastructure in Ukraine. Power plants, oil and gas storage facilities and transportation hubs are under attack from long-range fires.
And that has consequences: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (44) said this week that about 30 percent of the power plants had been destroyed. But they are working hard to restore the infrastructure. The population suffers the most because they have to live without electricity.
Now the Russians apparently have a very big goal. According to Ukraine, the dam of the hydroelectric power station Kakhovka has been mined. The factory, which was built in 1955, is located in the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson.
The area is very competitive. Putin’s troops are in distress. Withdraw is difficult. In recent weeks, the Ukrainian army has made bridges over the Dnipro impassable. Russia would most likely have to rely heavily on a temporary barge bridge and military pontoon ferries.
Kherson and 80 villages would be washed away
The Russians are trapped. And that’s exactly why they were able to blow up the dam. The goal is to stop the Ukrainian advance. And in doing so, they could cause a “catastrophe of great proportions,” Selenski warned. In the event of a dam bursting, hundreds of thousands of people on the Dnipro River would be at risk.
No wonder: the reservoir is gigantic. The reservoir is 240 kilometers long and has a capacity of 18.2 billion cubic meters of water. By comparison, Switzerland’s largest dam, the Grande Dixence in the canton of Valais, has a capacity of 400 million cubic metres.
An explosion of the Kachowka Dam would result in a giant tidal wave. This would flood the city of Kherson and 80 other villages. But that’s not all: a disruption to the water supply in southern Ukraine would also affect the cooling system at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant. If the dam were to be destroyed, “the North Crimean Canal would simply disappear,” which supplies the Crimea Black Sea peninsula, which was annexed by Russia in 2014.
Ukrainians must save electricity
In view of the advancing Ukrainian troops, the Russians began to withdraw from the city of Kherson on Wednesday and “evacuate” civilians. 15,000 people have now been taken to the left bank of the Dnipro, explains board representative Kirill Stremusov (45). Kiev condemned the action as “deportation” of civilians to Russia.
After numerous Russian attacks on the electricity infrastructure in the country, Ukrainians have been called on since Thursday to save electricity. Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko (51) has asked residents of the capital not to use large electrical appliances between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. Even a small energy saving in every household will help stabilize the functioning of Ukraine’s energy system, he said.
In a video speech at the EU summit in Brussels, Zelenskyy accused Russia of turning his country’s energy infrastructure into a “battlefield”. Russia is thus causing a new wave of refugees in the EU countries. Moscow aims to provide electricity and heating to Ukraine in the fall and winter and “send as many Ukrainians as possible to their country,” Zelensky told EU countries.
The Ukrainian leader called on EU countries to equip Kiev with increasingly sophisticated air defense systems and impose further economic sanctions on Moscow.