Sure you can.  What you clearly don't understand is that dams have gates that are raised and lowered as needed.  They are typically weldments of steel similar to a boat hull.

NATO tested out their abilities to breach these discharge gates via missile attack around the time Russia was relocating to the East side of the river for the winter.  Worked fine.  Most 'medicated' Westerners cannot remember something which happened that long ago and are to stupid to know how to research things.

I get such a kick out of the bleeting Western media droning on and on about the 'catastrophy' like it was the end of the world, and 'the poor huddled and shivering animals' and blah, blah, blah.  It's a fuckin flood just like happens thousands of times per year where I live (and pretty much every place I've ever lived.  Waist-high water for a few days for cryin-out-loud.  Get over it.

Everyone who has more than a few brain cells to rub together knew this thing was coming.  I've mentioned it probably half a dozen times starting a ways before the Russians withdrew across the river.  It was obvious because the Ukroids said that they were waiting to get more desperate (again, having already tested things out.)

What might have happened here is that Russia drew down the water levels in a somewhat controlled manner since, as anyone with some engineering can see, the dam was not blown down to the native surface level (and it does seem to have been attacked in an area which Russia controlled from what I can see.)  One reason to do this would be if the Ukroids had tunneled it such that a blast would indeed take the level down to zero in one shot.  That would indeed have been a more challenging 'disaster'.