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CCTV of Explosion that Damaged Kakhovka Hydroelectric Dam
Published 2 years ago
CCTV footage recorded at the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Dam captures the moment an explosion caused by Russian forces during their retreat damaged critical electrical infrastructure in Kherson.
It's unclear what Russia's objective was with this explosion. From a strategic standpoint, the destruction of the bridge across the Kakhovka Dam would prevent the pursuit of retreating Russian forces by advancing Ukrainian forces. This would effectively make it more difficult for advancing Ukrainian forces to further exploit the retreating Russians. Militarily speaking, the destruction of the bridge across the top of Kakhovka makes sense.
If we apply malice to the picture however, it could easily appear that Russian forces attempted to destroy the dam in an attempt to not only adversely impact critical electrical infrastructure, but also to flood regions down-stream of the Kakhovka Dam. Currently the thought process of many is that everything Russia has done or is doing is conducted with malicious intent instead of just critical military strategy, and I can understand that point of view pretty well. That said, I find it unlikely that Russian engineers wouldn't be able to properly do the math required to entirely destroy the Kakhovka Dam.
Regardless of intent, this is the best footage of the explosion that rocked the dam. If I had to wager on the intent, I would say the engineers rigged the bridge to explode and erred on the side of using more explosives than they needed hoping the damage to critical infrastructure in Kherson would buy them more time to properly retreat and reconsolidate on the other side.
