MOSCOW, October 24. /TASS/. Vladimir Rogov, chairman of the We Are Together with Russia civil society group, on Monday said Ukrainian forces could blow up the Dneprovskaya and Kakhovskaya hydro power plants at the same time in an attempt to decommission the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant.
"I don’t rule out that they will try to combine two scenarios. On the one hand, start with blowing up the Dneprovskaya hydro power plant and then the Kakhovskaya hydropower plant. That would flood the Zaporozhye NPP and then remove the possibility to cool it," he told TASS.
Detonations at each of the plants have their own consequences but they will first of all affect civilians, he said.
"It will definitely affect tens of settlements. That would be hundreds of thousands of injured and dead," Rogov said.
The activist said that a terrorist attack on the Kakhovskaya HPP would cause the flooding of about 80 settlements and threaten to disrupt the cooling systems of the Zaporozhye NPP. A blast at the Dneprovskaya HPP would cause the flooding of a considerable portion of Zaporozhye and some other settlements, as well as the flooding of the Zaporozhye NPP, he said.
The Kherson Region’s emergency services said on Monday that Ukrainian forces launched a rocket strike on the Kakhovskaya HPP. Vladimir Leontyev, the mayor of Novaya Kakhovka, told TASS that the plant continues to operate and there are no leaks in the dam. He also said specialists continue to drain water from the dam to mitigate the risks from a potential provocation by Kiev.