Russian Foreign Ministry publishes list of 28 alleged HIMARS strikes by Ukraine against Kakhovka dam, claiming that ‘methodical attacks’ caused Kherson disaster

Russian diplomats continue to argue that allegedly “methodical attacks” by the Ukrainian military against the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant are responsible for the dam’s collapse on June 6. Echoing comments by Moscow’s representative to the United Nations immediately following the disaster, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova published a list of “more than 300” HIMARS missiles Ukraine allegedly fired at the dam between July and November 2022.

Like Vasily Nebenzya, Zakharova also cited an interview Major General Andriy Kovalchuk gave to The Washington Post in December 2022, where the Ukrainian official described a successful “test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam,” experimenting with a “last resort” option to raise the Dnipro River’s waters enough to “stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages.”

In her post on the social network Telegram, Zakharova published a list of what she claims were 28 separate artillery strikes against the Kakhovka power station, arguing that these attacks ultimately caused the dam to collapse on June 6, 2023.

Russian officials have offered multiple explanations for the dam’s destruction, always blaming the Ukrainian military and the Western nations that have supplied Kyiv with advanced weaponry. Besides the Foreign Ministry’s talk of repeated rocket attacks, officials in Moscow have claimed that Ukrainian agents “sabotaged” the power station by somehow planting explosives inside.

While spokespeople for the U.S. government have cautioned that available evidence still makes it difficult to attribute responsibility for the dam’s destruction, experts told The New York Times that a “blast in an enclosed space” would do the most damage and constitutes the most plausible explanation. Seismic data picked up by the NORSAR observatory in Norway and footage recorded by infrared sensors on U.S. spy satellites show that an explosion occurred at the dam “just before it collapsed.”

Ukrainian officials say Russian forces (who controlled the power station and occupy the town that hosted the facility) are responsible for destroying the dam.