Massive blast after Russians bomb dam near Kherson during retreat

Retreating Russian forces have partially destroyed a dam near the city of Kherson, a sabotage that environmentalists had warned could flood downstream towns and villages.

A black and white video uploaded onto the website of the pro-war Russian newspaper Izvestia showed the moment a huge blast hit the Nova Kharkova dam.

In the video, the dam appears to be operating as normal when there is a blast and a flash of light. The video freezes momentarily and then shows debris flying off the dam and a fire.

Izvestia reported that Russian soldiers had blown up a road running across the dam to slow the Ukrainian advance.

“The bridge was the only remaining car crossing over the Dnipro River in Kherson,” it said.

But satellite photos suggested that the damage was more serious.

Benjamin Strick, a London-based open-source investigator who has previously worked for Bellingcat, highlighted the destruction of two other road bridges that cross the Dnipro River as well as the Nova Kharkov dam, which lies 35 miles upstream from Kherson.

“Damage is also seen at the Nova Kakhovka dam with sections of the northern extent of the dam and sluice gates deliberately destroyed,” he said.

The satellite photos of the two other road bridges, the Antonovsky Bridge in Kherson and a bridge near the village of Darivka, clearly showed gaping holes along them but the satellite photos of the dam showed damage to only one end.

This week as many as 30,000 Russian soldiers completed their withdrawal from the right back of the Dnipro River after the Russian ministry of defence said that it had become too hard to resupply them. The Russian plan appears to be to reestablish a defensive line on the left bank of the river and to blow up the road bridges across it.

The US-based Institute for the Study of War said in October that Russia may plan to blow up the Nova Kharkova dam to flood Kherson. The dam provides electricity for hundreds of thousands of people and environmentalists have said that blowing up the dam would create an “atomic bomb” of water crashing through towns and villages.