Ukrainians in August 2022, AP Photo/Leo Correa
June 15, 2023
Liam Collin, Founding Director, Modern War Institute, United States Military Academy West Point
On the morning of June 6, 2023, thousands of Ukrainians awoke to the sounds of rushing water following an explosion at the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River.
Initially, there were questions about how the dam collapsed or who was to blame, but mounting evidence indicates that the dam was deliberately breached by Russia.
In my view, as a career U.S. special forces officer, the simplest answer is most often correct and provides the most likely explanation for the dam’s destruction. It’s my belief that Russia deliberately destroyed the dam to defend against the Ukrainian counteroffensive that it believed was imminent.
As expected, the flooded river has created an insurmountable obstacle in southern Ukraine, which is allowing Russia to reposition soldiers from Kherson – where the damage is most acute – to other areas to support their defense.
It has also created a massive humanitarian crisis that Ukrainian military officials must resolve while at the same time plan and execute counteroffensives aimed at expelling Russian troops from their country.
Known as hydraulic warfare, the deliberate flooding of an area during combat is nothing new.
Quite to the contrary, it is an effective defensive technique that dates back hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
From 1584 to 1586, for example, Dutch rebels destroyed seawalls to flood low-lying areas to prevent Spanish invaders from advancing during the Eighty Years’ War.
In another instance, the Chinese military breached levees along the Yellow River in 1938 to slow the Japanese advance.
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In yet another example, in 1941, Russian secret police blew up the hydroelectric dam on the Dnieper River in Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine, to slow the Nazi advance.
In the current war against Russia, the Ukrainian military has also employed hydraulic warfare to defend its capital, Kyiv, successfully.
In the opening days of the war in February 2022, Ukrainians breached a dam on the Irpin River – after other methods of controlled flooding failed – to impede the large, mechanized Russian formations advancing on Kyiv from Belarus.