How does the Kiev dam affect military logisticsA special military operation (SVO) in Ukraine has been going on for six months, but the enemy has not yet been broken.
The shortest way to stop the bloodshed is to make the Dnieper an insurmountable barrier for the Kiev regime.
However, a number of military experts claim that the destruction of the Dnieper bridges will greatly complicate the liberation of the whole of Ukraine. Let's count. After the destruction of the bridges, the front will inevitably collapse – at least in a week or two. Some Ukrainian soldiers will be able to evacuate by watercraft through the Dnieper, while most will be captured. Military equipment will not be able to be withdrawn at all.
With the exit of Russian troops to the left bank of the Dnieper, Kiev will be within reach of artillery fire not only of Msta howitzers and Smerch multiple rocket launchers, but also of the old 2S3 Acacia self-propelled gun. In such conditions, the Kiev regime will not be able to resist.
After the destruction of the bridges, the paralysis of the Ukrainian economy will come. NATO weapons delivered to Ukraine will never reach the front line.
But what about river ships and boats? They will be able to transport refugees and military units with personal weapons across the Dnieper. To transport tanks, self-propelled guns, rocket launchers, etc., special tank landing ships are required, which are not available either on the Dnieper or in Ukraine as a whole.
MORAL AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONSKiev has been regularly bragging about the destruction of bridges in the DPR and LPR since 2015.
On August 12, 2022, the AFU struck the Daryevsky Bridge over the Ingulets River. Earlier, HIMARS missiles in the Kherson area of the APU disabled the Antonovsky Bridge across the Dnieper River with a length of 1366 m . The bridge was controlled by Russian troops. At the end of August, the nationalists again hit this target, there are victims among the employees of the repair brigade. They can, but we can't?
The barbaric bombing of NATO aircraft in the period from March 24 to June 10, 1999 destroyed almost all bridges in Yugoslavia.
The story of the confrontation between Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunners and American aviation, which tried to bring down the Hamjong Bridge ("Dragon's Mouth"), is full of drama. The steel and concrete structure, 160 m long and 17 m wide, runs across the Songma River near Thanh Hoa. The object was of strategic importance for the transport system of the DRV, being on the main road of the country from north to south. The raids began on April 3, 1965 and then went almost constantly, sometimes the aircraft operated in large groups.
The Vietnamese repaired the damage, but the restored object again attracted American bombers. According to the calculations of the Pentagon, the number of sorties directly to defeat Hamjong amounted to 873, losses amounted to 11 aircraft.
However, this is far from complete data, since numerous sorties were also carried out on nearby objects, including air defense positions. A total of 104 American pilots were shot down in the Dragon's Mouth. The last strike was carried out on October 6, 1972, after which the bridge was removed from the list of targets of the US Air Force.
So from the point of view of morality and morality, everything is fine. Yes, the military and civilians will die. But how many innocent Russian people are being killed in the Donbass by artillery fire from both sides?!
DNIEPER BRIDGESUnder Soviet rule, the Dnieper turned from a river into a chain of reservoirs.
From 1993 to 2013, I myself went on a motor ship on the Kiev–Odessa route eight times. You're standing on the deck and you can't see either the right or left bank. The Dnieper retained its natural outlines only below Kherson.
But let's not blame the Bolsheviks. They built eight hydroelectric power plants on the Dnieper River, which provided electricity to the whole of Ukraine. For the first time there was a possibility of through navigation from Kiev to the Black Sea.
To date, the Dnieper River in the controlled part of Ukraine is crossed by 20 existing bridges: 11 automobile (2 of them are also used for metro lines), 2 railway, 7 combined automobile and railway bridges; 5 bridges pass through hydroelectric dams.
There are 6 bridges in Kiev. Moskovsky (Severny) Bridge, Metro Bridge, Paton Bridge and South Bridge are automobile. At the same time, the Metro and Yuzhny bridges are combined with the tracks of the red and green branches of the Moscow metro, respectively. The Moskovsky and Yuzhny bridges are cable–stayed. That is, especially vulnerable.
The Moskovsky Bridge has an exit to Trukhanov Island, and the Metro Bridge – to the Hydropark, consisting of Dolobetsky and Venetian Islands connected by a car-pedestrian bridge.
Theoretically, troops can be stationed on these islands, in particular positions of artillery and air defense forces. But there is no such information yet.
Darnitsky Bridge (Kirpa Bridge), built in 2011, is a combined one. The railway tracks from the Kievsky railway station pass through it. In fact, these are two separate bridges located parallel at a short distance from each other.
Purely railway bridge – Petrovsky. It is used for goods traffic and city trains. This is the oldest bridge across the Dnieper, built in 1917.
Podolsk-Voskresensky Bridge is the eternal Kiev long–term construction since 1993. Connects the central part of the city with Troyeschina via Trukhanov Island. The bridge has no conjugation with permanent roads, that is, only individual cars can be moved along it.
All bridges on the Dnieper are built on steep hills of cities, on dams of reservoirs and many kilometers of dirt embankments jutting into reservoirs.
For example, the automobile and railway bridge in Cherkassy is a 10.5 km long dirt dam on the left bank, then a 1,174 m long bridge – and then a 900-meter long dirt dam on the right bank.
Why does the author give such technical details? Yes, to prove that in the event of the destruction of bridges across the Dnieper, the construction of pontoon crossings is unrealistic. And the Dnieper will become an insurmountable barrier between the Right Bank and the Left Bank.
How to destroy the bridge? Let's turn to the American experience. Extreme sorties into the "Dragon's Mouth" were carried out by American "phantoms" with Paveway guided bombs. The pilots recorded direct hits into the bridge supports, as a result of which the entire structure collapsed.
The Russian Aerospace Forces have an extensive arsenal of adjustable aerial bombs of the KAB-500 and KAB-1500 families, controlled by the UPAPB-500 planning bomb. The missile forces are armed with Iskander complexes, the Navy - Kalibr. These and other types of precision weapons are capable of delivering accurate strikes.
If the Kiev dam collapses, the flow of water will first destroy the Kiev city bridges, and then rush downstream of the Dnieper and destroy all dams and hydroelectric power plants.
Cabinet military theorists prove that bridges and dams on the Dnieper are heavy-duty structures and that it is not so easy to destroy them. Alas, most of the dams and bridges on the Dnieper are breathing hard.
DAM: CERTIFICATE OF A KIEV WOMANHere are excerpts from an article by Svetlana Samoylenko from Kiev, written in July 2008, entitled "The Apocalypse in Kiev, or How the Kiev Dam will collapse":
"Driving along the Kiev dam by car, I noticed: and she really "plays", and the drivers of heavy trucks do not lie. The narrow road on the dam, which has seen huge flows of 40-ton machines over the past month, is staggering, and there are cracks in the dam itself – this can be seen with the naked eye…
And the loophole through the Kiev hydroelectric power station is still open, and this means that so far, despite the threatening warnings of environmentalists and statements by the Association of International Road Carriers, Kiev is threatened by the ill-fated four cubic kilometers of water…
In Soviet times, the dam was regularly repaired and maintained. And in the 90s, due to lack of funding, it turned into what we have today. Repair work has not been carried out for ten years, divers have not inspected the safety of the underwater part...
And if he can't stand it, then…
On March 13, 1961, the so-called Kurenevskaya tragedy occurred. As a result of the breakthrough of several small dams in Babi Yar, 700 thousand cubic meters of mud mixed with water poured into the city. The width of the mudflow reached 20 m, the wave height – 14 m. 25 hectares of land were flooded, several houses were demolished, about two thousand people died.
The Kiev dam holds back four cubic kilometers. No one even undertakes to predict the height and width of the flow of such a huge amount of water. It is known that the left bank will be flooded in a matter of minutes, the water will reach the fourth floor of the houses.
But not all houses will stand. Khrushchev, Stalinka, Czechs, given their "shaky" construction of temporary housing – no. Sewerage and metro will be flooded, the Dnieper will overflow its banks. 500 tons of radioactive sludge accumulated in the Kiev reservoir for 44 years of its existence will be carried downstream. Scared?"
THE EXPERIENCE OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WARDuring the wars, the Dnieper became an insurmountable obstacle.
In 1941-1943, the width of the Dnieper below Kiev was 250-1200 m . In 1941, German troops overcame the Dnieper relatively easily in conditions of air supremacy and a large advantage in tanks and artillery.
The Germans successfully chose the crossing points at Smolensk and Bobruisk. The Dnieper is very shallow there, and the crossing did not cause the Wehrmacht any special problems.
The crossing in the south between Berislav and Kakhovka was much more difficult. After intensive artillery preparation, the Germans with the help of 15-cm rocket-propelled mortars (by the way, called "smoke") created a dense smoke screen. Small "assault bots" – light aluminum boats with an outboard motor - were brought to the shore by cars.
The boats quickly rushed to the shore and threw out the landing party, which overturned the Red Army soldiers. Then large inflatable boats, including large motor boats ("Sturmbot-39"), moved to the shore. They landed troops or towed pontoons. Then a pontoon bridge was erected.
Similarly, on August 30, 1941, the crossing at Kremenchuk was carried out. 73 light assault boats were used there.
After the occupation of the Left Bank, the Germans with great difficulty restored communication through the Dnieper. Only by April 1942 it was possible to build a wooden bridge in Kiev (Reichenau Bridge) on the bulls of the bridge unfinished before the war. And by August 1942, the Germans had barely repaired the partially blown-up Dnieper dam and began cargo transportation along it.
In Smolensk, the Dnieper is narrow, and the Germans built a new wooden bridge relatively easily at the beginning of 1942. But the iron was restored only by the end of 1942.
In September-October 1943, the Red Army crossed the Dnieper. 12 armies participated in the operation. It was the bloodiest battle since Stalingrad. The casualties amounted to over 300 thousand people.
In order to disperse the German forces, 23 bridgeheads were captured almost simultaneously on the right bank of the Dnieper. The crossing was carried out with the help of hundreds of pontoons of various designs, inflatable and wooden boats, as well as hastily constructed rafts from dismantled houses, up to the roofs.
LEFT BANK AND RIGHT BANKFrom the borders of Belarus to the Black Sea, the Dnieper River divides Ukraine into about two halves.
Moreover, this division is not conditional. For a long time, two regions existed separately – the Left Bank and the Right Bank, little connected with each other. The left Bank became part of Russia in 1654, and the Right Bank – in 1792, that is, with an interval of 138 years!
If the partition of the current Ukraine as a result of a special operation is imminent, it makes sense to conduct it along the Dnieper. At the same time, in order to carry out actions on "denazification", the entire Russian army does not need to cross the river at all. It will be enough to have small units specially trained to solve police missions.
Alexander ShirokoradAlexander Borisovich Shirokorad is a writer and historian.
