A group of current and former Russian officials calls on Russian troops to return to the “universally recognized” borders of the Russian Federation due to the environmental disaster caused by the explosion of the Kakhovskaya HPP dam in the Kherson region. This is stated in a report by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
We are talking about representatives of the municipal authorities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as the Moscow and Leningrad regions of the Russian Federation. Analysts report that they signed an open letter, which states that the destruction of the Kakhovskaya HPP dam will negatively affect the planet’s ecosystem, health and economic issues for many decades. The appeal also indicated that the actions of the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine led to “unspecified catastrophic events”.
ISW experts believe that Russian officials not connected to the Kremlin are likely to use public concern about the consequences of the destruction of the hydroelectric dam to express opposition to the war against Ukraine, bypassing criticism of the military actions directly. “The Kremlin suppressed anti-war dissent on a large scale. Therefore, in Russia, opponents of the war can use the destruction of hydroelectric power plants to express their disagreement with the war in a very limited way,” the report notes.
