The Destruction of the Ukrainian Dam Is an Atrocity, Not a ‘Disaster’

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, June 06, 2023

 

‘It’s a massive disaster.” That was the assessment Swedish hydrological-engineering expert Henrik Ölander-Hjalmarsson provided NBC News when asked for comment on the overnight destruction of Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam. That’s a forgivably common way to describe devastation of this magnitude, but it’s also a description that would apply to ravages of an earthquake or a structure fire. The implosion of the edifice holding back the full force of the Dnipro River was no accident nor an act of God. It was most likely a deliberate, indiscriminate attack on Ukrainian civilians and on global ecology.

 

The destruction of the dam in the early-morning hours on Tuesday could not be immediately attributed to one side of the conflict in Ukraine. Jim Geraghty has the details. Perhaps the Ukrainians flooded their own land — displacing thousands of residents and cutting off a potential axis in the coming counteroffensive but also displacing the Russians from the positions into which they had dug on the Dnipro’s left bank. Maybe the dam simply burst due to the negligence of the Russians occupying it. The reserves it was holding back had risen to dangerously high levels, and the dam was previously damaged amid the fighting. But all this rationalized the likeliest explanation for this terrible event: deliberate Russian sabotage.

 

Just before 3 a.m., local residents reported hearing loud explosions — an unfortunately common occurrence in wartime, so they didn’t overthink it. Russian news sources reported that “nothing at all” had occurred at the dam, but predawn videos shot by locals began chronicling the rising floodwaters. With sunrise, the wholesale destruction of the dam was evident to all. Catastrophic flooding to the surrounding towns and cities, including the regional capital of Kherson, would follow within hours.

 

The Russian-based Interfax news agency’s sources finally admitted only to structural failure. “The dam of the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station in the Kherson region collapsed on Tuesday night due to the collapse of one support, a representative of the emergency services of the region said,” the outlet’s report read. Even as the floodwaters rose around them, Russian-backed officials in Ukraine comically insisted that all was well. But this was no accident. “The U.S. government has intelligence that is leaning toward Russia as the culprit of the attack, according to two U.S. officials and one Western official,” NBC News reported later that day.

 

But why, some asked? What does Russia have to gain by compromising its own defensive positions, choking off the supply of water the dam diverts to occupied Crimea, and flooding thousands of hectares of arable land Moscow had only recently annexed into the Russian federation proper? The questions are based on a false premise, one that presupposes Russia has any interest in preserving land it is attempting to seize or safeguarding the people it seeks to subjugate.

 

Russia had the motive. The dam’s collapse, which occurred within 24 hours of Kyiv’s admission that it had shifted from defensive to “offensive actions,” forecloses on the prospect of a Ukrainian river-crossing operation across the Dnipro into southern Kherson Oblast. At least for some time, access to the other bank of the Dnipro and a southern axis in the counteroffensive, if one was in the cards at all, will have to swing south from Zaporizhzhia. If little else, Russia’s beleaguered forces in Ukraine have bought themselves time and space to attrite Ukrainian attackers.

 

Russia had the means. The Financial Times’s Europe editor, Ben Hall, summarized the Russian actions that preceded this egregious event:

 

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.

 

Moreover, Russia has the mentality to pull off an operation this egregious — a classic scorched-earth tactic from the country that popularized the term. We don’t have to look back to the Napoleonic era for evidence of Russia’s will to salt the earth behind it in retreat, Vladimir Putin’s obsession with the 19th century notwithstanding. While falling back amid the Nazi onslaught in the summer of 1941, Soviet secret police acting on Stalin’s orders destroyed a dam on this same river not far from Nova Kakhovka to delay the German advance. It would be fitting to see this tactic resurrected amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, the largest war on the European continent since 1945 and the closest thing to total war the world has witnessed since.

 

Moscow may have temporarily succeeded in blunting some of Ukraine’s capacity to recapture its territory under Russian occupation, but the cost is steep. The flooding has compounded an already terrible humanitarian disaster in Ukraine. For those who are not displaced by the flooding, the shortages of power and potable water will add deprivation to the already horrible features of this war. It has introduced thousands of gallons of oils, gasoline, and agricultural chemicals into the waterway that is now spilling into the Black Sea. This act of desperation has exposed (for all who are willing to see it) the hollowness of Moscow’s claim on Ukraine’s land and people. The Ukrainians whom Russia cannot yoke it would subsume in a great flood. Most shortsightedly of all from Moscow’s point of view, the effort to bog Ukraine down has truncated its own vital supply lines from the Crimean Peninsula. It was a cost that Moscow was apparently willing to accept if only to temporarily impede Kyiv’s advance.

 

By denying its involvement in this event, despite all evidence to the contrary, the Kremlin is tacitly admitting that the dam’s destruction is a great crime. The deniability Moscow is cultivating will complicate the message it likely hopes to send: Russia reserves the right to escalate its war, and it is not afraid to decimate population centers in the process. Those who are susceptible to the deterrent force of this threat don’t need convincing. But the atrocity of which Russia is likely guilty will steel the resolve of Ukrainians more than it will frighten them. The Ukrainians are still coming, now with even more barbarities to avenge.