If you timed the dambusting just right so that you could hit your enemy’s army crossing downstream with a wall of water, that sounds promising.
But it’s hard to get the timing right. For example, in August 1941, Stalin sent NKVD agents to blow up the Soviet Union’s biggest dam, the Dnieper Dam at Zaporizhzhya. But the destruction appears to have been suboptimally premature, catching retreating Red Army units rather than the advancing Nazis (as well as tens of thousands of Soviet civilians). From the American propaganda site Radio Free Europe:
Officials acknowledge that innocent civilians died but defend the dam’s destruction as a necessary measure that helped save countless lives.
“There was no one at the time to defend Zaporizhzhya,” says Oleksiy Baburin, the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party’s regional branch. “We had very few soldiers. There were almost no NKVD troops or military regiments who could have stopped the Germans. This is why blowing up DniproHES allowed for the evacuation to continue.”
But a number of historians reject such claims, insisting that the operation was poorly timed and that Nazi troops had no immediate plans to seize the city.
Historian Vladyslav Moroko says the men in charge of the mission, Boris Epov and Aleksandr Petrovsky, rushed the dam’s explosion due to their fear of Stalin.
“In reality, Epov and his subordinates were concerned less by the possible German invasion of Zaporizhzhya than by the fact that they may not be able to carry out Stalin’s order,” Moroko says. “They were afraid that DniproHES would be captured and that they would not be able to carry out Stalin’s order.”
Later the Germans partly rebuilt the dam, but blew it up themselves when retreating in 1943.
Now a different dam downstream on the Dnieper River at Kakhova is gone. Apparently, there was a big explosion heard by locals in the middle of the night. On the other hand, satellite photos suggest the dam was deteriorating for several days, so who knows?
Both Ukraine and Russia accuse the other of blowing up the dam. The Dnieper represents the frontline between the two forces at the dam, with the Russians controlling the hydroelectric plant.
Who dun it?
Beats me.
The Russians might have done it to wipe out a Ukrainian offensive downstream. But is there a Ukrainian offensive downstream? The Russians don’t seem to be exulting about washing the Ukrainian Army into the Black Sea.
The Ukrainians might have done it to prevent the Russians from doing it later when they actually are crossing the Dnieper downstream.
Russian military bloggers argue that the Ukrainians blew up the dam to drain the upstream reservoir to make an offensive easier. But they’d still have to cross the huge Dnieper River and all the mud at the bottom of the ex-reservoir. Anyway, far enough upstream, the Ukrainians are already across the Dnieper.
Maybe the Ukrainians did it to cut off the water canal running from the reservoir to the Crimea. Or the Russians did it to cause a crisis at the nuclear power plant cooled by water from the reservoir. But if the Russians are planning to hold onto the territory they’ve currently conquered, creating a second Chernobyl sounds self-defeating.
Maybe the Russians did it to prevent the Ukrainians from crossing the bridge on top of the reservoir.
Or maybe the Russians (or Ukrainians) got nervous and blew it up ahead of time for no very good reason.
Stuff like that happens during wars.
This is the third spectacular sabotage attack of this war: first, the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic, then the bridge from the Russian mainland to Crimea.
I’ve speculated that Ukraine pulled off both.
The Kerch Bridge attack is now broadly assumed to have been a Ukrainian operation. And the evidence has been mounting that so was Nord Stream.
I wrote on September 28, 2022, the second day after the pipeline attack:
This operation doesn’t seem all that complicated. For example, you could buy a fishing boat anywhere in the Atlantic and fly in to staff it with your own fishermen and a handful of deep sea divers. You purchase undersea mining explosives somewhere, such as corrupt Belgium where they don’t ask too many questions. Heck, you could go to West Africa if needed. You sail it to the Baltic for the herring harvest. At night, you happen to drift over the pipeline, send your divers down, then move on before dawn. Repeat as needed. A week later when you are back at home, the timers go off.
The budget seems pretty minimal: a couple of million dollars for the boat, a million for supplies, a million for wages, and a million for bonuses.
Any state along the North Atlantic could have pulled this off. But for the noncombatants it would be a sizable escalation and thus a big risk.
There are two combatants: Russia and Ukraine. The suddenly popular argument that Russia blowing up Russia’s own strategic pipeline would be in Russia’s interest seems strained to me. I haven’t heard any terribly skillful arguments for this, which suggests that this came as a big surprise to the anti-Russian coalition.
The argument that it would seem worth the risk to Ukraine, which is fighting for its national survival, seems pretty plausible.
Occam’s Razor points toward Ukraine as the perpetrator.
And now from the Washington Post, news that that Air National Guard dude who posted Top Secret documents to his chat group to show he was a Major Player spilled the beans on Nord Stream:
THE DISCORD LEAKS | The CIA learned last June, via a European spy agency, that a six-person team of Ukrainian special operations forces intended to sabotage the Russia-to-Germany natural gas project
By Shane Harris and Souad Mekhennet June 6, 2023 at 10:52 a.m. EDT
Three months before saboteurs bombed the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, the Biden administration learned from a close ally that the Ukrainian military had planned a covert attack on the undersea network, using a small team of divers who reported directly to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces.
Details about the plan, which have not been previously reported, were collected by a European intelligence service and shared with the CIA in June 2022. They provide some of the most specific evidence to date linking the government of Ukraine to the eventual attack in the Baltic Sea, which U.S. and Western officials have called a brazen and dangerous act of sabotage on Europe’s energy infrastructure.
The European intelligence report was shared on the chat platform Discord, allegedly by Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira. The Washington Post obtained a copy from one of Teixeira’s online friends.
The intelligence report was based on information obtained from an individual in Ukraine. The source’s information could not immediately be corroborated, but the CIA shared the report with Germany and other European countries last June, according to multiple officials familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence operations and diplomatic discussions.
The highly specific details, which include numbers of operatives and methods of attack, show that for nearly a year, Western allies have had a basis to suspect Kyiv in the sabotage. That assessment has only strengthened in recent months as German law enforcement investigators uncovered evidence about the bombing that bears striking similarities to what the European service said Ukraine was planning.
The Germans found a boat rented by Ukrainians with traces of the explosive used to blow up the pipelines.
Officials in multiple countries confirmed that the intelligence summary posted on Discord accurately stated what the European service told the CIA. …
Some Biden administration officials initially suggested that Russia was to blame for what President Biden called “a deliberate act of sabotage,” promising that the United States would work with its allies “to get to the bottom of exactly what … happened.” …
Biden administration officials now privately concede there is no evidence that conclusively points to Moscow’s involvement. But publicly they have deflected questions about who might beresponsible. European officials in several countries have quietly suggested that Ukraine was behind the attack but have resistedpublicly saying so over fears that blaming Kyiv could fracture the alliance against Russia. At gatherings of European and NATO policymakers, officials have settled into a rhythm; asone senior European diplomat said recently, “Don’t talk about Nord Stream.”
The European intelligence made clear that the would-be attackers were not rogue operatives. All those involved reported directly to Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s highest-ranking military officer, who was put in charge so that the nation’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, wouldn’t know about the operation, the intelligence report said.
Keeping Zelensky out of the loop would have given the Ukrainian leader a plausible way to deny involvement in an audacious attack on civilian infrastructure that could ignite public outrage and jeopardize Western support for Ukraine—particularly in Germany, which before the war got half its natural gas from Russia and had long championed the Nord Stream project in the face of opposition from other European allies. …
But according to German law enforcement officials investigating September’s Nord Stream bombing, key details emerging of that operation line up with the earlier plot.
For instance, the Ukrainian individual who informed the European intelligence service in June said that six members of Ukraine’s special operations forces using false identities intended to rent a boat and, using a submersible vehicle, dive to the floor of the Baltic Sea and then damage or destroy the pipeline and escape undetected. In addition to oxygen, the team planned to bring helium, which is recommended for especially deep dives.
German investigators now believe that six individuals using fake passports rented a sailing yacht in September, embarked from Germany and planted explosives that severed the pipelines, according to officials familiar with that investigation. They believe the operatives were skilled divers, given that the explosives were planted at a depth of about 240 feet, in the range that experts say helium would be helpful for maintaining mental focus.
Investigators have matched explosive residue found on the pipeline to traces found inside the cabin of the yacht, called Andromeda. And they have linked Ukrainian individuals to the rental of the boat via an apparent front company in Poland. Investigators also suspect that at least one individual who serves in the Ukrainian military was involved in the sabotage operation.
So, like I speculated last September, this wasn’t some byzantine Kremlin plot to blow up its own economic asset nor some Tom Clancy–scale giga-project that only the U.S. military industrial complex could pull off. It was a pretty middling-sized operation with probably a 7 figure budget that the single most motivated player, the country being invaded, could handle.
Now a different dam downstream on the Dnieper River at Kakhova is gone. Apparently, there was a big explosion heard by locals in the middle of the night. On the other hand, satellite photos suggest the dam was deteriorating for several days, so who knows?
