Putin is probably planning to pull out, and wants to leave Ukraine with lots of problems when they take Crimea. Also this makes it a lot harder for Ukraine to focus on the Donbas warfare.
Possibly. But for now I’m chalking it up to the Russian boots on the ground getting their excuses in early in anticipation of a retreat.
The dam has been weakening over weeks or months, with Russia fully in control. If Russia actually thought strategically, that would’ve been a “hearts and minds” opportunity. Nobody in the world would’ve thought badly of Russia if they’d simply said Ukraine’s experiment in the fall is about to result in the dam failing, and if they’d called out for assistance or even a DMZ agreement with Ukraine to avert a disaster.
Instead the evidence is all over Telegram that soldiers were ordered to booby trap the crossing, that there were explosives under the water line, and nobody was treating a dam breach as anything more than an opportunity to frustrate Ukrainian forces crossing the river.
Talking heads on Russian TV calling for dams and HEPs to be destroyed - repeatedly - only validates the warnings from Zelenskyy that Russia WANTED the dam to burst.
Then there’s Russia pulling its people out of towns along the south side of the river... As if they were expecting a major disaster.
The most optimistic view is, it looks like the dam was so unstable that one small explosion on/in it would’ve cracked it. Either Ukraine or Russia could’ve caused this, entirely unintentionally.
A more realistic view is, Russia knew that dam was going to crack, and was preoccupied with how they could benefit militarily. They kept alleging Ukraine was going to attack the dam but Ukraine doesn’t appear to have taken the bait.
Expectations may have been, a minor breach would scupper the advances across the islands downstream without hurting the Russian occupied region.
The sudden U-turn in the Russian narratives suggest exactly that. Initially they claimed credit for the explosions successfully repelling a Uke attack. Initially they scorned suggestions that anything big had happened.
Only after the scale of the damage to the dam became undeniable did they scurry around claiming one minute that a Uke drone did it, the next that a Uke missile did it.