Zelenskyy says Russia plans to blow up a Ukrainian dam. The Soviets used the same tactic in WWII to slow a Nazi invasion, killing thousands of civilians.
- Zelenskyy accused Russian forces of planning to blow up a major dam in southern Ukraine.
- He said flooding would sweep across dozens of towns and hundreds of thousands of people in the area.
Retreating Russian forces in Ukraine may be planning to echo a tactic used by the Soviets in World War 2 — sabotage that reportedly led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in 1941 — according to allegations by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of planning to blow up a major hydroelectric dam in southern Ukraine as its forces struggle to hold off advancing Ukrainian forces.
During a Thursday address to the European Council, Zelenskyy claimed Russian troops mined the key Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant as its forces struggle to hold off advancing Ukrainian forces.
Zelenskyy said Russian troops are "deliberately creating the grounds for a large-scale disaster" — which would hit hundreds of thousands of people with flooding across 80 towns — and plan to lay blame on Ukraine in a "false flag" attack.
Zelenskyy said Russia had kicked out Ukrainian workers from the dam, but Insider could not verify the claims of a pending Russia plot.
Echoes of an earlier disaster
If Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces carry out an attack on the Ukrainian dam, the move would mirror a deadly tactic used by the Soviet Union during World War II in the same area in an attempt to slow the German invasion.
In 1941, Nazi forces invaded what is now eastern Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union.
As the Red Army retreated on August 18, agents with the predecessor of the KGB used dynamite to blow up the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station — which is just over 150 miles upriver from the Kakhovka dam that Zelenskyy alleges is now being targeted.
Flooding from the explosions cut off access to the city of Zaporizhzhya, slowing the German invasion. But a massive wave swept over nearby villages along the river, killing thousands of unsuspecting civilians as well as Red Army officers who were crossing the water.
According to a Radio Free Europe report on the tragedy, between 20,000 and 100,000 people died.
In an interview with Ukrainian television channel 1+1 in 2009, survivor Oleksiy Dotsenko said "people were screaming for help."
"Cows were mooing, pigs were squealing. People were climbing on trees," he said, according to Radio Free Europe.
The dam-busting tactic was also used by Ukrainian forces earlier in the war with Russia this year as Putin's troops marched on the capital Kyiv. Villagers in Demydiv and Ukrainian soldiers intentionally flooded the village to thwart the push to capture Kyiv.
Unlike the Soviets' actions though, there were no reports of any civilian casualties in the flooding and villagers told the New York Times they were proud to cooperate and stop the Russia attack.
Russian attacks on civilian targets
Over the last few months, Russian forces have targeted schools, hospitals, humanitarian shelters, energy facilities, roads, apartment complexes, and other civilian targets in Ukraine as part of their unprovoked invasion.
Ukrainian forces continue to advance closer to the southern Russian-occupied city of Kherson — a major city just under 50 miles from the dam that's one of the few remaining cities captured by Russia still under their control.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, wrote in a Wednesday analysis that Russian forces are "setting information conditions to conduct a false-flag attack" on the dam, meaning they would blame Ukraine for the destruction.
"The Russian military may believe that breaching the dam could cover their retreat from the [western] right bank of the Dnipro River and prevent or delay Ukrainian advances across the river," the ISW wrote in its analysis.