Part of the huge dam in Kherson, which is under Russian control, collapsed on Tuesday morning, flooding large swathes of a war zone and threatening the lives of tens of thousands.
According to a Ukrainian official who spoke to “Sky News Arabia”, on condition of anonymity, that Kiev has prepared alternative plans for the counterattack, and that the attack is still ongoing and has been well prepared logistically and militarily, although the flood waters would limit Kiev’s options.
Kiev said several months ago that Russian forces had mined the dam, and indicated that Moscow had blown it up as an attempt to prevent its forces from crossing the Dnipro River, while Russia holds Ukraine responsible for that environmental and military disaster in the midst of the war.
Has the counterattack begun?
Amid conflicting Ukrainian accounts, attributed by observers to an attempt to confuse Russia and not explicitly revealing the timing of the attack in order to preserve the secrecy of military operations, Oleksiy Danilov, Secretary of the National Security Council of Ukraine, said on Wednesday that his country had not yet launched a counterattack to regain its lands.
• The beginning of the attack will be clear to everyone when it occurs.
• Russian officials were right when they believed that the Ukrainian advance in some areas of the front lines was the beginning of the larger operation, according to Reuters.
• All this is not true when the attack begins, as it is our army that will decide it.
On the destruction of the dam, Danilov said:
• Without a doubt, Russia caused the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River because the region has been under occupation since the beginning of the Russian invasion.
According to Hana Malyar, the Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Defense, on Wednesday, Ukraine advanced in the last hours between 200 meters and 1100 meters in some areas surrounding the city of Bakhmut.
For its part, the “Washington Post” newspaper confirmed, Thursday, that Ukraine launched its counter-attack on Wednesday, which opens the door to a decisive phase of the war aimed at regaining its lands and maintaining Western support.
The newspaper quoted several members of the Ukrainian army as saying that Kiev had intensified its attacks in the southeastern regions of the country, and the fighting was “violent and continuous.”
• The process is expected to extend over several months, according to the newspaper.
• It will be the test of the Washington-led strategy to prepare Ukrainian forces with all the most advanced military methods.
Russia responds
Russian President Vladimir Putin described the destruction of the Kakhovskaya station as “a barbaric act carried out by Kiev at the direction of Western curators.”
As for Vladimir Rogov, head of the “We are with Russia” movement in Zaporozhye, he said Thursday that the destruction of the station is part of the Ukrainian counter-attack plan.
• Ukraine was preparing to destroy the station, to flood the coastal areas, to withdraw the forces and reserves of the Russian forces in this direction with the aim of launching an offensive in Zaporizhia.
• Ukrainian forces managed to gain a foothold only at one height near the village of Rabotino and there are continuous battles.
• Ukraine’s goal is to seize the city of Tokmak, to storm the Azov letter, to cut off the land corridor to the Crimea.
Does the bombing of the dam impede the attack?
Following the collapse of the dam, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that it would not affect Kiev’s plans to move forward with its counterattack aimed at regaining its lands from Russian forces.
But the destruction is likely to limit Kiev’s options in its initial counterattack, according to the Financial Times.
And about the timing of this, she describes the matter as: “suspicious, and it benefits Russia to a large extent to thwart Kiev’s plans in the south and increase the possibility of launching an eastern attack that Moscow can focus on.”
As for the British newspaper, The Guardian, it said, on Thursday, that:
• The Ukrainian attack will be very expensive even if it succeeds.
Its signs appeared during the recent military operations on several sectors along the front lines.
• The collapse of the dam will not affect the attack.
• Kiev has alternatives and military plans, but no matter how much its military and combat capabilities increase, it will incur huge human losses.
• It is not easy because Moscow has prepared impregnable defensive lines in anticipation of the Ukrainian moves.
For his part, military expert Peter Alex told Sky News Arabia that, according to Al-Mutawwal, the recent Ukrainian military moves on several fronts came within the framework of the counterattack:
• The Ukrainian attack is a message to the West that its massive aid has not been in vain, and a message to the interior to raise the morale of the Ukrainian people.
• Russia takes advantage of the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam to prevent any breakthroughs to its front in Kherson.
• With the destruction of the dam, Kiev’s launch of a military operation in Kherson became unclear.
• Ukraine has alternative plans after assessing the damage caused by the collapse of the dam, and if it represented a disaster, it would not stop Ukraine’s counterattack.
• It is possible that Moscow blew up the dam to disrupt the advance of the Ukrainians and flood the islands downstream of the Dnipro River after the Ukrainian forces regained control of them.
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