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Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

So:

1. What side does this help?

2. How does this action help that side?

  - settlements on river banks will be swept away
  - the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe, ZNPP, won't be restarted due to lack of cooling
  - Crimea will lost access to fresh water
  - First line of defence for both sides are swept away.
  - it will be harder for Ukraine side to mount an amphibious assault

So it's a lose-lose situation for everyone.

Not if you’re going to lose anyway

Who does that apply to?

I'm kinda happy for that power plant not to be restarted though.

It's much better for it to be in a shutdown state if it finds itself in the middle of combat again. I know Ukraine needed the power but it getting damaged could cause problems far beyond Ukraine. One Chernobyl was enough. But I hope it has enough cooling water to cool its storage reservoirs.

All the other effects are terrible of course :( And all favour Russia.

It was in shutdown state ever since it was taken by Russia and there were no plans to restart it until the end of the conflict.

Oh ok I read somewhere they wanted to restart it soon. In that case it's also a bad outcome of this dam bust indeed :(

It will also make it easier for Ukraine to attack upstream when the reservoir is empty. In places where there are virtually no Russian defenses. So that's a win for Ukraine.

First, the reservoir won't empty completely. Second, if it were there will be meters of mud on the bottom of it. It's possibly more impassable when empty.

In short term yeah, it will probably be too muddy. But it will dry over time and in the long term this unlocked a completely new axis of attack for Ukrainians. Similarly in the downstream regions. The water will go away eventually and it will be much easier for Ukrainians to attack in the future, when the Russians will not have the capability to flood the downstream regions with this dam.

The Dnipro is still a large river to cross and it's not going away. I looked at it in Google Maps and it's at least 500 m wide before and after the reservoir.

Btw, Google added the flooding marks to the map.

I am actually not sure how wide it will end up. Dnipro is actually reservoirs all the way up to Kyiv. It will be Ukrainians in Dniper HES that will control the flow from now on.

It's firstly a gigantic humanitarian disaster with likely many many dead, pure act of terrorism.

Not the first, almost certainly won't be the last.

Benefits the Russians who have been dealing with a Ukranian counter-offensive, and commentators have been wondering if Ukraine would attempt to cross the Dnipro and mount a counter-offensive to cut Crimea off from the mainland.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tRYWbVD5AE is a great visualization of why that task is basically impossible now.

Scorched earth retreats are also a time-honored Soviet and Russian military strategy.

I'd love to read an expert source on that, if you have one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_of_Moscow_(1812)

A dam on the same river was blown up by retreating Soviet troops in WW2: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/02/second-world-w...

Interesting, thanks, though only one incident. Do you know any sources on Russian military strategy?

Footage coming out in the last two days showed heavy Ukraine armour losses, so I am not sure whether this is necessarily because Russians were on backfoot. The overflow would be higher towards South so it will hurt Russian defensive preparations more once the water has receded.

> Footage coming out in the last two days showed heavy Ukraine armour losses, so I am not sure whether this is necessarily because Russians were on backfoot.

Do you have any links about that?

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