By Jim
Geraghty
Tuesday,
June 06, 2023
Seventy-nine
years ago today, the U.S. and its allies launched a highly anticipated
military offensive on the European continent. Yesterday, on the other side of
Europe, another highly
anticipated military offensive began in Ukraine:
The Ukrainian offensive is “taking place in several directions,” Deputy
Defense Minister Hanna Maliar told Ukrainian television on Monday. . . .
“It is not only about Bakhmut. The offensive is taking place in several
directions. We are happy about every meter. Today is a successful day for our
forces,” she said. . . .
In a Monday Telegram post, Maliar said the country’s troops were
“carrying out offensive actions” on the eastern front and had “advanced in
several directions” around the city of Bakhmut: near the settlements of
Orikhovo-Vasylivka and Paraskoviivka to the north, and near Ivanivske and
Klishchiivka to the southwest.
Serhii Cherevatyi, spokesman for the Eastern Grouping of the Ukrainian
Armed Forces, also spoke of “an offensive assault” by the Ukrainians “on the
southern and northern flanks of Bakhmut” on national TV on Monday.
But
within a day, someone, almost certainly the Russians, took a drastic action
and added a
catastrophic complication to the battlefield in south-central Ukraine:
A major dam and hydroelectric power plant in southern Ukraine were
severely damaged by an explosion on Tuesday, unleashing flooding near the front
lines. As water gushed from the facility on the Dnieper River, which separates
Ukrainian and Russian forces, officials on both sides ordered residents to
evacuate. Ukraine’s military intelligence agency accused Russian forces of
blowing up the Nova Kakhovka dam, while the Kremlin denied this and blamed
“Ukrainian sabotage” for the damage.
The Nova
Kakhovka dam is in Kherson Oblast (province or district), just north of Crimea;
the occupied and then liberated port city of Kherson is downstream and the
Dnieper River eventually flows into the Black Sea. Pamela Constable of the Washington
Post reported from the city of Dnipro upstream, “A dramatic drop in the dam’s
reservoir could lead to an ecological disaster and disrupt the cooling of
reactors at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, 75 miles to the northeast,
according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural
Resources. The plant is under Russian control.”
The Financial
Times adds up the evidence pointing at the Russians:
Russia, which controls the area, has denied responsibility and blamed
Ukrainian shelling for the dam’s breach. These claims are implausible. Kyiv had
nothing to gain from a catastrophic flood. It is possible that the structure,
damaged in previous strikes, could have given way. Russian occupying
authorities had allowed the water in the reservoir behind to rise to unusually
high levels, which would make it a case of criminal neglect. . . .
Russian forces had rigged explosives to the dam last autumn after
Ukraine’s army liberated the right bank of the river. They have attacked other
hydroelectric plants in their attempt to destroy Ukraine’s critical
infrastructure. And last September they fired eight cruise missiles at a dam
over the nearby Inhulets river, unleashing a torrent and hampering the advance
of Ukrainian troops in the area.
And on
social media, residents reported
hearing explosions around 2:20 a.m. local time.
When you
look at the expected consequences of this dam bursting, the Ukrainians have
little incentive to blow up their own infrastructure on such a devastating and
consequential scale. When the war is over, the Ukrainians want to still live
there. But the Russians have a strong incentive to create as many problems for
the Ukrainians as possible to disrupt the counter-offensive. The Ukrainian
minister of foreign affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, tweeted this morning:
Infuriating to see some media report “Kyiv and Moscow accusing each
other” of ruining the Kakhovka dam. It puts facts and propaganda on equal
footing. Ukraine is facing a huge humanitarian and environmental crisis. Ignoring
this fact means playing Russia’s ‘not all obvious’ game.
The
Russian accusation isn’t logical. Why would Ukrainian saboteurs arrange a whole
new set of life-threatening complications and headaches for their own side,
right as the counter-offensive is starting?
Those of
us with long memories can recall Saddam Hussein’s moves during the Persian Gulf
War — releasing more than 11 million
barrels of oil into the Gulf, creating the largest oil spill in history, attempting to
deter an amphibious assault that was always a feint. Then Hussein’s forces
systematically blew up oil wells, tanks, refineries, and other facilities in
Kuwait, and burned 4 to 6 million barrels of crude oil per day, setting so many
fires it took nine months to put them all out.
Dictators
are almost always willing to wreck the environment when they think it will give
them a military advantage. This is why it’s always so laughable
when some nutjob green contends that authoritarian regimes are better for the
environment.
Eyeing
the Nuclear Threat
Over
in UnHerd, Kevin Ryan writes that Vladimir Putin is almost
certain to use nuclear weapons before the war ends. None of us have a crystal
ball, and there is no denying that some voices in the Russian government have
turned to nuclear saber-rattling, and in particular on Russian state television,
some voices are openly calling for the use of nuclear weapons. One Russian
talking head called for Moscow to threaten to nuke “several
decision-making centers on British territory.” As I wrote
back in October,
“It definitely feels as if we’re dealing with a different Russia now — angrier,
more desperate, more erratic.”
And way
back in March of 2022, I looked at the various ways Russia could use its
tactical nuclear weapons in an attempt to win a decisive advantage in Ukraine. (Some of those with particularly
poor reading comprehension concluded I was a “neocon” and calling for the use
of nuclear weapons or calling for a U.S. nuclear strike on Russia. I swear,
it’s like some people have an allergic reaction to learning new things.)
There
are ways to attempt to minimize the radioactive fallout from the use of a
tactical nuclear weapon, but even if you detonate a nuclear weapon underground,
if the blast penetrates the Earth’s surface, there will be
intense and deadly radioactive fallout released from any penetration points. And those spots
will be uninhabitable for a long time:
Most of the particles decay rapidly. Even so, beyond the blast radius of
the exploding weapons there would be areas (hot spots) the survivors could not
enter because of radioactive contamination from long-lived radioactive isotopes
like strontium 90 or cesium 137. For the survivors of a nuclear war, this
lingering radiation hazard could represent a grave threat for as long as one to
five years after the attack.
The
whole point of a war of conquest is to acquire territory. Vladimir Putin
has spoken of Ukraine as “an integral part of our own history, culture, and
spiritual space.” Back in 2021, Putin wrote:
Our spiritual, human and civilizational ties formed for centuries and
have their origins in the same sources, they have been hardened by common
trials, achievements and victories. Our kinship has been transmitted from
generation to generation. It is in the hearts and the memory of people living
in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our
families.
You
generally don’t want to irradiate an “integral part” of your own “history,
culture, and spiritual space.” To put this into American terms, if, God forbid,
there is ever a second American Civil War, no side will want to nuke Lexington
and Concord, or Yorktown, or Gettysburg, or Pearl Harbor. But we can’t count on
this as a guarantee that Putin would never reach such a point of rage,
frustration, or desperation that he would turn to using tactical nukes.
While
Putin is obsessed with getting back a country that he perceives as a “lost crown
jewel,” he clearly
doesn’t care what condition it’s in when he gets it back. There’s simply not much left
of the city of Bakhmut, once home to more than 70,000 people. The Russians left the cities
of Mariupol,
Sievierodonetsk, and Maryinka in a similarly battered shape.
The
destruction of the dam is an ominous sign that Putin and the Russian forces may
be starting to feel that if they can’t control the territory, they should wreck
everything in their wake. And the Russian state’s calculation about escalating
to the use of tactical nuclear weapons is likely different if Putin is in a
mental state like that.
Rethinking
Ukrainian Strikes on Russian Soil
The
position of the Biden administration is that the Ukrainian
military should not use U.S.-provided weapons to hit Russian targets in Russian
territory. So far,
it appears that Ukraine is using non-U.S.
weaponry to hit Russian targets in Russian territory — sometimes very deep in
Russian territory. U.S. intelligence reportedly believes that the small drone
attack above the Kremlin on May 3 was not a Russian false flag, and indeed “was likely orchestrated by
one of Ukraine’s special military or intelligence units.” Last week, a drone attacked
Rublyovka, an
upscale part of the Moscow suburbs, but did little damage; a few days later,
drones attacked and caused fires at two Russian
oil refineries east
of the Crimean peninsula.
CNN reported, “Ukraine has cultivated a
network of agents and sympathizers inside Russia working to carry out acts of
sabotage against Russian targets and has begun providing them with drones to
stage attacks,” citing “multiple people familiar with U.S. intelligence on the
matter.”
Yesterday,
the New York Times reported that the Biden administration is
no longer all that worried that Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil
represent some sort of
unacceptable provocation. “As Ukraine’s counteroffensive edges closer, a series of bold attacks
in Russia, from a swarm of drone attacks in Moscow to the shelling of towns in
the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine and an incursion into the country using
American-made armored vehicles, have been greeted by the Biden administration
with the diplomatic equivalent of a shrug.”
It
appears there is no way for the U.S. to discourage Ukraine from launching
attacks against targets on Russian soil. (As MBD has discussed, the elected
government of Ukraine has never had
full control over all the nationalist militias that operate in the country. And that lack of full
control may be somewhat convenient for Volodymyr Zelensky, allowing the
Ukrainian government to declare it’s above tactics such as crashing
drones into civilian targets like apartment buildings in Moscow . . . but enjoying the
intimidation benefits of someone attacking civilian targets like apartment
buildings in Moscow.)
It also
does not appear that Russia is interested in a ceasefire or any peace talks if
they involve removing its forces from territory conquered since the start of
the war. And it also does not appear that the Ukrainians are interested in a
ceasefire or any peace talks if they involve allowing Russian forces to remain
in territory conquered since the start of the war.
ADDENDUM: CNN chairman and CEO Chris
Licht has lost the support of CNN’s employees, reports . . .
er, CNN’s Oliver Darcy. Making this report
even more complicated: Last month after the CNN town hall with Trump, Licht “summoned Darcy and his editor
to a meeting with himself and top executives in which they told him that his
coverage of Trump town hall had been too emotional and stressed the importance
of remaining dispassionate.”
In other
words, Darcy is reporting, “The boss who summoned me to his office and
reprimanded me for being too emotional in front of all the top executives is
widely unpopular and has lost the support of my colleagues.”
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