Russia and Ukraine blamed each other for the destruction of a dam in occupied Ukraine.
But the military experts told German media that they see Russia as having carried out the attack for strategic reasons.
“Everything points to the Russians having blown up the dam,’’ military expert Carlo Masala told the news portal t-online on Tuesday.
Moscow was pursuing two goals with this: to create chaos and to hinder a counteroffensive by Ukraine, he said.
Both the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine and the hydroelectric power plant there were destroyed by an explosion that unleashed flood waters down the Dnipro River.
Masala said Russia was concerned with slowing down a Ukrainian counteroffensive that had already begun.
A river crossing is the most difficult operation ever for armed forces, said the professor from the Bundeswehr University in Munich.
With rising waters and the flooding of both banks of the river, Ukrainian offensive operations at that point would become effectively impossible.
Nevertheless, Russia would not be able to stop a counter-offensive completely, he said.
Military expert Christian Mölling of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) agreed that the Russians wanted to mess up the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which is starting to work in some places.
Mölling told the newspapers of the Funke media group that the blowing up of the dam was a stumbling block for the Ukrainian offensive.
Due to the flooding, fewer Russian soldiers would now have to be present on the eastern side of the Dnipro River.
This would allow Russia to distribute forces to other sections of the front in the east.
However, he thought it unlikely that an advance across the Dnipro would be at the center of Kiev’s counteroffensive.
