Tucker Carlson Appears Wrong About Who Destroyed Ukrainian Dam

ANALYSIS – The Russians did it. Or so it now appears.

While Tucker Carlson made a huge splash (pun intended) when he publicly accused Ukraine of blowing up its own Kakhovka dam in Russian-occupied territory earlier this month, a mound of evidence increasingly suggests that Russia blew up the critical dam.

While critical of Carlson’s often pro-Russian talking points, I was initially open to Carlson’s claims about the dam, and wrote about it here.

I noted that while it was far better to wait and see, the fact that recent reports appear to suggest that Ukrainian covert operatives were behind the undersea sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, not Russia as many claimed, didn’t help the Ukrainian case.

However, I also later referred to drone footage of collapsed Ukrainian dam that appeared to counter Russia and Carlson’s narrative.

I noted that the “footage of the collapsed dam and surrounding villages under Russian occupation shows the ruined structure falling and hundreds of submerged homes, greenhouses and even a church – with no sign of life.”

This looked more like an inside job by the Russians. But I still wasn’t totally convinced.

Now, The New York Times, citing engineers and explosive experts, is saying the same thing: “A dam in Ukraine was designed to withstand almost any attack imaginable — from the outside. The evidence suggests Russia blew it up from within.”

And I go where the evidence leads.

The paper said last Friday, June 16, that its investigation found evidence suggesting an explosive charge in a passageway running through the dam’s concrete base detonated, destroying the structure on June 6.

The Kremlin accuses Kyiv of sabotaging the hydroelectric dam, which held a reservoir the size of the U.S. Great Salt Lake, to cut off a key source of water for Crimea and distract attention from a “faltering” counter-offensive against Russian forces.

Ukraine accuses Russia of blowing up the Soviet-era dam, under Russian control since early days of its invasion in 2022, unleashing flood water across a large swath of the battleground, destroying farmland and cutting off water supplies to civilians.

And this time Ukraine may be right. As the Times says:

In the chaotic aftermath, with each side blaming the other for the collapse, multiple explanations are theoretically possible. But the evidence clearly suggests the dam was crippled by an explosion set off by the side that controls it: Russia.

And the Times explains why in detail:

Deep inside the dam was an Achilles’ heel. And because the dam was built during Soviet times, Moscow had every page of the engineering drawings and knew where it was.

The dam was built with an enormous concrete block at its base. A small passageway runs through it, reachable from the dam’s machine room. It was in this passageway, the evidence suggests, that an explosive charge detonated and destroyed the dam.

While the sluice gates, cranes and the roadway above the water line seemed to offer an easy target for an attack aimed at destroying the Kakhovka dam, most of the dam’s enormous mass was hidden below the surface of the water.

This, according to diagrams of the structure obtained by the Times and detailed descriptions by an engineer who reportedly spent months at the Kakhovka dam and around the reservoir. The engineer said he hoped a charge had not been put deep inside the enormous dam, because the damage would be irreparable.

But that appears most likely. And the Times provides a lot more evidence, from experts and satellite imagery to video footage.

The Times also reported a senior American military official saying that the United States had ruled out an external missile or bomb attack on the dam, and now assesses that the explosion likely came from one or more charges set inside it, most probably by the Russians.

So, for now I’m going with – ‘the Russians did it.’

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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