Sputnik
A major catastrophe was unleashed along the southern banks of the Dnepr River Tuesday, with thousands of residents displaced after the Kakhovka hydroplant’s dam was destroyed and water gushed inland, flooding local settlements, forests, and farms. Sputnik asked two top Russian military analysts to answer a simple question: who benefits?
The fallout from Tuesday’s attack on the Kakhovka dam continues to mount, with the Kremlin characterizing the incident as a “barbaric act” ordered “at the suggestion of [Kiev’s] Western curators,” and a calamity which has unleashed a “large-scale environmental and human disaster.”
A US-based private Earth imaging company released before and after satellite photos showing the consequences of the flooding, with much of the town of Novaya Kakhovka in Russia's Kherson completely submerged in water, together with other settlements on both the Russian and Ukrainian-controlled sides of the river.
A European Space Agency satellite tracking water levels June 5, 6, and 7 showed the extent of the rising water levels across the region over the three days.
The Kakhovka dam attack is another example of the Zelensky regime’s absolute disregard for casualties and destruction in the ongoing NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, and another demonstration of the West’s cynical maxim of "fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian," says prominent Russian military observer Alexey Leonkov.
“When there are no impressive battlefield victories, but one needs to raise the degree of the demonization of Russia, one can really go all out. The regime in Kiev and those who control it do not care whatsoever about what happens to Ukraine in the future, or speaking more precisely, its people. They want to leave for Russia a territory in accordance with scorched earth tactics – destruction, an embittered population, preferably with environmental pollution, radioactive residues or perhaps [the fallout from] biological weapons,” Leonkov, the editor of Arsenal Otechestva, a Russian military affairs magazine, told Sputnik.
Leonkov is convinced that Ukraine’s military and government lack any real independence, and carry out the policy of Western powers paying the bills. Kiev’s patrons are “absolutely uninterested in Ukraine’s lands or the people who live there…They do not care how many people will die, how many cities and villages are destroyed, how many environmental disasters and other calamities they face. They don’t give a damn about it,” the observer said.
For Russia, these same territories are a kind of “shrine,” he said. “These lands were settled and developed by our ancestors. We fought for these lands in two world wars. We are not indifferent to these territories, or the people living there. That’s why we are trying to conduct a military operation, not an all-out war that destroys everything and everyone…Our enemy, and this is clear, consists of [30 countries], all of them members of the NATO bloc. This adversary…has already stated that they will [strive to] realize their goals ‘to the last Ukrainian.’”
Leonkov believes the attack on the Kakhovka dam is linked directly to the failure of Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive, with the flooding of the region giving the Ukrainian military the opportunity to remove troops from the Kherson direction, with the knowledge that Russian forces will have no opportunity to advance.
Alexander Mikhailov, the head of the Bureau of Political and Military Analysis, a Russian military think tank, echoed Leonkov’s take, telling Sputnik that Kherson’s flooding will give Kiev a two-to-three week window in the course of which they can remove troops from this section of the front.
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