How Putin has become ‘Little Stalin’ using brutal Soviet tactics from blowing up dam to sending own men to the slaughter

RUSSIA'S brutal destruction of a Ukrainian dam leaving thousands fleeing for their lives is Vladimir Putin taking a page right from the brutal playbook of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Putin's manmade disaster is an almost exact copy of an attack by Stalin back in 1941 - which may have killed up to 100,000 innocent civilians.

And it should be no surprise, as Putin appears to admire the former Soviet leader - who is estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of some 9million people before his own demise in 1953.

Putin has praised Stalin's leadership, credited him for transforming Russia, and has openly and repeatedly bemoaned the demise of the Sovet Union.

The Ukraine war has seen more parallels drawn between the two tyrants, with one Balkan-based commentator dubbing him "".

The destruction of the Nova Khakovka dam and the city of Kherson is just the beginning of the comparison between the duo.

Both have sent their soldiers to die en masse, ruthlessly cracked down on opponents, ruled Russia with an iron fist and tried to turn their nation into a superpower to face down the West.

Historians and experts also see the comparison - and while Stalin and Putin may have different politics, they are both merciless demagogues.

The bursting of Nova Khakovka dam in southern Ukraine this week devastated the city of Kherson and its surrounding villages.

Aerial footage showed the thick body of water surging out and destroying everything in its path - estimated to be worth more than £50billion in damage.

The devastating strike was a mirror image of an atrocity in World War 2 - when Stalin ordered the demolition of another dam on the Dnipro.

Soviet forces blew up the Zaporizhzhia dam when Nazi forces were marching towards the eastern town to slow down the killer offensive.

Mikhail Pervukhin, a Soviet electric power station official, wrote in his diary at the time: "The explosion should be organised in such a way as not only to prevent the enemy from moving to the other shore, but also to destroy as much of his equipment and manpower as possible."

However, the destruction of the dam also resulted in the deaths of up to 100,000 innocent people who lived downstream.

In 1941, nobody who lived in the floodplains downriver were warned about the dam breaking and chaos broke loose as the water levels quickly rose.

This week, those who live downstream were also given no warning.

Oleksiy Dotsenko survived the horror incident in the second World War, and told Ukrainian television about the day the waters broke loose.

He said: "People were screaming for help. Cows were mooing, pigs were squealing. People were climbing on trees."

Ukraine is set to evacuate some 17,000 people from the flooded areas - with the destruction of the dam set to be classed as a war crime.

The number of dead, injured, and trapped from the dam blast remains unclear at this stage as the region reels from the unprecedented disaster.

"No one knows when it will stop - and it's so unpredictable with how fast the water can come," one rescuer, working on the West bank on Dnipro, told The Sun Online.

Floating mines are also an ongoing concern as they washed down the river - potentially exploding as they are hidden beneath murky mud-churned waters.

"They can be washed into villages and cities - they can be anywhere and injure civilians," the rescuer told The Sun Online.

The true extent of the disaster will only be known once the flood water has receded.

The similarities between Russia's latest cowardly bombing and the 1941 calamity has shown Putin is willing to mimic the former dictator as his fetish for the Soviet Union plays out on the world stage.

But it stems further than last week - Putin reportedly would point to bookshelves and ask guests to choose a book from Joseph Stalin's library when they visited him in his new office in the Kremlin.

In an essay in the New Statesman, historian Simon Sebag Montefiore argued while the two leaders were different on paper, there was plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.

He said: "Putin is not Stalin.

"Stalin was a Marxist.

"Putin is a tyrant, who, while co-opting elements of Romanov and Soviet imperialism, is a populist and nationalist, a practitioner of 21st-century identity politics who deploys both old-fashioned military heavy metal and the new hi-tech weaponry of social media.

"Yet Stalin could not be more relevant.

"Putin’s repression at home increasingly resembles Stalinist tyranny – in its cult of fear, rallying of patriotic displays, crushing of protests, brazen lies and total control of media."

Simon claimed Ukraine was also brutally repressed under Stalin's regime and Putin was almost trying to relive it.

He said: "The Russian president shares a part of Stalin’s determination to liquidate the nationality and ­independence of Ukraine at any cost."

Historically Russia has fought wars using "mass" - playing a "numbers game" to overwhelm or exhaust their enemies, experts claim.

This played out in World War 1 and World War 2, with Russia believed to have suffered the highest casualty rates in both wars - with up 2.2million being lost in WW1 and up to 11.4million in WW2.

More than 8.6million Soviet soldiers died under Stalin's watch over the course of the war.

And in roughly 16 months since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin kingpin has traded mass bodies for time as he funnels more soldiers into the meat grinder.

Ukraine officials claim they have killed some 200,000 Russians since February 24.

Those deaths mean Russia had lost 13,300 soldiers a month, 3,250 troops a week, 450 men a day, 20 every hour, or one every three minutes since he invaded.

Simon warned Putin was becoming dangerously close to repeating the history of his predecessor.

He said: "Putin sees Stalin as a flawed titan born, like Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon, for revolution.

"But it looks as if Putin has now switched from authoritarian rule to totalitarian oppression.

"Stalinist trials, camps, executions may well follow: after all, Stalin is in the bloodstream of the Russian body politic – and Putin himself."