‘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.
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