An OSINT journalist on Twitter carried out the most detailed investigation yet into the dam's destruction - far more thorough than the Nev York Times article mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. The conclusions are contentious, but the evidence is clear - backed up by multiple hydraulic engineers.
When Russia invaded and occupied the area, they took responsibility for maintaining the dam. They are the ones that started the massive outflow of water. So, whether they mismanaged the dam and ended up destroying it, or blew it up - they are responsible.
Yes, OSINTJOURNO was quite clear about this too, although it may not have been evident in that particular TwiX thread. The ultimate responsibility lies with the Russian occupiers.
I can explain it to you, even though it will inevitably be downvoted for being unsavory to our readers' mindset ..
In the fog of war, all bets are off.
Apparently, we do not have the evidence of who actually blew the dam, because we do not have the conditions required to gain sufficiently suitable evidence. Perhaps one day we will, but sufficient doubt exists that we cannot make canonical conclusions.
Yet.
The best we can do is use conjecture and assumptions - but in the court of world opinion, this just simply isn't enough. It is the same situation behind the destruction of the Nordstream 2 pipeline or the Duma gas attacks - we can make assumptions, and conjecture, over who did it and how and for what purpose - but until there is actionable evidence, its simply not enough to make conclusions based on ones own political position.
Such is the nature of Lady Liberty - she is blind in the face of verifiable evidence - and this is a core Western Value which shall not be abrogated, for any reason - especially in the face of oppression, where she is needed most.
Did everyone forget that Ukraine was happily shelling the Kakhovka dam last year and that every western media outlet was reporting on it[1]?
It's sort of a rhetorical question, since the answer is clearly yes, but come on, we sit here talking like we know everything better than everyone else, about the world, about policy and everything else in general, yet we constantly forget things that happened only a couple of months ago?
Russians did this because Russians are crazy evil beings that like to destroy their own shit. Really? I understand that sort of reasoning coming from the media outlets that gave us the Iraq war amongst other things, but hacker news? Is that what we pride ourselves in?
EDIT: Just to add to this, did people also forget that the nuclear power plant was shelled by "someone" while Russia was occupying it and IAEA inspectors were observing?[2] And that even the IAEA director general ended up refuting claims/lies[3] by Zelensky about mining the power plant[4].
See, that is entirely the point. In the fog of war, unless someone takes responsibility for an action, we cannot be sure who performed that action.
There is substantial reason to believe that covert Western operatives are also on the battleground. This is, after all, what those trillions of dollars of 'investment' each year, are all about .. however this equally valid suspicion is, tribally, also easily overlooked.
I think the question has to be asked - who benefits?
It is like Nordstream where we are supposed to believe the Russians did it. Yet they controlled the taps to it and had no benefit from blowing it up.
I read a lot of information from the Russian side and we clearly have two truths regarding the Kakhovka Dam. The Russians understand that the Kiev regime did it. Furthermore, if you look at the graph of the water level in the lake, the Kiev regime released water from upstream to deliberately top it up so they could blow it up and sweep away all of the Russian armed forces downstream in the Kherson area.
People that only get their news from one side - the NATO side - are not aware of how the Russians understand what happened. I suspect these people are the ones that are modding you down, but sometimes getting down voted is worth it.
The IAEA didn't refute anything, their statement was couched in tons of language like "from the areas we have seen" while also stating that they haven't been allowed to see all of the areas they wanted to see.
Anyway, from the article in the OP
"The destruction of the dam, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a news conference a week after the event, "ruined their counteroffensive in this direction." It was a comment that didn’t fit particularly well with his claim that the Ukrainians had destroyed the dam themselves."
It's just like with the little green men who invaded Crimea:
2014: "It isn't us, you can go to the store and buy any uniforms."
2015: "That’s why I gave orders to the Defense Ministry -- why hide it? -- to deploy special forces of the GRU as well as marines and commandos there under the guise of reinforcing security for our military facilities in Crimea."
2023: “I want to point out and I want everyone to know about it: The maintenance of the entire Wagner Group was fully provided for by the state.”
Putin never wanted peace through the Mink agreements, he only wanted to buy time. But US and the UK weren't wasting time either.
"Amid rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine in early 2022, Russia officially recognised the DPR and LPR on 21 February 2022.[9] Following that decision, on 22 February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that the Minsk agreements "no longer existed", and that Ukraine, not Russia, was to blame for their collapse.[10] Russia then invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022."
Happo-Kuzushi. Judoka balance breaking married with maskirovka. He basically played the naïve European leaders. The only ones who weren't played this time were the Americans and the UK who wanted to send weapons and military instructors, which they eventually did.
Putin wants peace, just under his own terms. Think Belarus, only with weaker puppets he can control. What he wants is Leonid Kuchma and Vladimir Voronin type of "leaders". He doesn't want a Korean solution and it probably wouldn't work anyway because Ukraine is not a peninsula. That's what the Minsk agreements were basically proposing. Of course, everyone broke them, especially the separatists and the Russians who back them.
And immediately broken. Why were "green men" invading Ukraine, putin LYING about them not being russian army and then later telling proudly that of course they were russian army.
>"The destruction of the dam, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a news conference a week after the event, "ruined their counteroffensive in this direction." It was a comment that didn’t fit particularly well with his claim that the Ukrainians had destroyed the dam themselves."
It fits just fine. Ukraine was pressured into this offensive by its western partners and was publicly dragging its feet for months. They knew it wouldn't be successful.
Washing their hands of one of the fronts while doing a massive amount of damage to the Russian side of the Dnieper that they knew they were never going to recapture probably seemed like a good trade off.
The narrative that Russia blew it up and did more damage to themselves because they were terrified of the counter offensive, on the other hand, matches with reality about as well as "Russia blew up nordstream 2" did. Their public stance before the offensive was that it would be a catastrophic failure because it lacked air support and was at a munitions disadvantage and lo and behold that's exactly what happened.
So why on earth would they blow up a dam that would do far more damage to the areas they controlled?
> So why on earth would they blow up a dam that would do far more damage to the areas they controlled?
Because actions like this are less about Russia winning and more about Ukraine losing.
They did this to cause decades of damage to Ukraines industry and an ecocide.
It’s the same reason they fire missiles into civilian buildings, destroy power plants during winter, rape and torture children, execute teenagers and fire on civilians.
L
The terror and damage destruction is the point.
Destruction of this dam was also a war crime by Russia.
They gain a lot by trying to cover up another of there war crimes and to muddy the water with their firehose of falsehood propaganda method.
>They did this to cause decades of damage to Ukraines industry and an ecocide.
"They did this to cause decades of damage to Ukraines industry and an ecocide" and ended up doing more damage to the side they controlled doesn't make any sense at all. Not unless you assume that Russia is some irrational cartoonist supervillain that would cut off its own nose to spite its face.
"They did this because they were terrified of the counter offensive" made more sense than that.
They went to Ukraine to take the land required to give them a buffer against NATO-aligned forces, which have called for the destruction of Russia for years - and thats exactly what they've created.
Whether you like that answer or not, has no bearing on whether the cartoon-character in your head reflects reality. It clearly doesn't.
> They went to Ukraine to take the land required to give them a buffer against NATO-aligned forces, which have called for the destruction of Russia for years - and thats exactly what they've created.
Interesting cause the victory article they accidentally posted then quickly deleted didn’t even mention NATO once.
But do you know what it did talk about?, the tragedy of Ukrainian independence and fixing that historical “mistake” of 1991.
That sounds more like imperialism than wanting a buffer state to me.
Next stop: a nuclear bomb gets dropped on a Ukrainian city wiping out thousands of people like nothing and we'll still have someone stating "we don't really know who did it". I'm honestly amazed humanity made it to 2023
Ask yourself, by what means do we get there? The answer is: people believing they are more right than anyone else.
>humanity
We have been doing the opposite - believing in the righteousness of others - as well. Somehow, it has balanced out so far, but that is really the point of being a fair and open society, seeking truth in the face of all duress, in order to provide justice: we have a balance.
Until the call for the more base, banal emotions overwhelms the rational and the discreet, and - above all - the common truth-seeking which all humans can produce, no matter the languages we use, we have peace.
But, when that happens, it happens fast and it happens on the basis of forgone conclusions, know-best, pride, hubris and arrogance. On all sides of the fence.
As long as there is a modicum of truth-seeking left - and not assumption-based superstition-driven mob rule - we humans have a lot more than 2023 to attain ..
From the point of view of morality, I'm of the opinion that Russia did it. Even if Ukraine actually pulled the trigger.
Just like in many US states: if you and your buddy get into someone's house to rob it in the middle of the night, and the homeowner gets his revolver and shoots your buddy dead, and you run out and the police catch you, it will be you that will be prosecuted for murder. You created the situation that led to the end result.
That is a slippery slope argument that can be equitably applied by the Russians who believe this war was started by the West in 2016.
Be careful with the ease by which you can adopt this perspective. It doesn't actually serve you to adopt such fallacies. Evidence is important - faith in the world institutions that will act on that evidence, just as important. Literally nothing in your position will have a positive effect on those institutions.
> Russians who believe this war was started by the West in 2016.
Why 2016? Putin first sent his troops to Ukraine in 2014. So from his point of view it would make sense to convince his citizens he was "forced" to do it earlier, not later.
For context, I live in middle-Europe, very close to the war, and as a result of my volunteer work with refugees, I have had extensive contact with both Ukrainian refugees, as well as Russian citizens entangled in this heinous mess.
The Russians I have spoken to about this consider that the West started aggressively arming Ukraine for this war in 2016, which was when official, overt US policies were put in place to allow it.
They identify this year as the point of no return, as "the West started officially arming Ukraine for conflict in 2016", a fact that can be observed in the US' 2016 Section 655 Report by the Dept of State. This is when US weapons first made it to the front lines.
I'm not here to argue for them - I would suggest you seek out Russian citizens and engage them on the topic, if it interests you what the other side have to say about this. I relay this merely to give context to this discussion; not because my opinion aligns with any of this.
Then: "We were forced to invade Hungary and Czechoslovakia, they wanted free elections."
Now: "We were forced to invade Ukraine, the US gave them weapons to defend themselves and they won't have our man as president."
The US, UK and now the rest of NATO are doing the right thing arming Ukraine. The US ia doing the right thing approving weapons sales to Taiwan and Korea.
"The US gave them weapons to attack Russia." <- ftfy.
The USA, which arms well known fascist totalitarian-authoritarian dictators engaged in actual genocide, is doing absolutely the wrong thing. US' arms exports are a significant cause of war and calamity across the globe - not safety and security. War, and calamity.
If the US were building roads and water treatment plants across the globe, instead of bombing them - then your claim that it is doing the right thing might have some substance. But, it isn't. The only thing the US builds on foreign nations' soils, is illegal dark CIA torture bases.
> "The US gave them weapons to attack Russia." <- ftfy.
This would only make sense if Ukrainians were suicidal enough to actually even consider attacking Russia. Yet, in spite of massive attacks on civil houses and infrastructure, there is nothing comparable on the part of Ukraine. They attacked very few targets on Russian soil, and as far as I can tell, these were only military targets, and attacked only after Russia started the war.
One would have to be either delusional or paranoid to think Ukraine wanted to attack Russia. The only thing these folsk wanted is to stay as far away from the Russian regime as possible. Unfortunately, they weren't allowed to.
>This would only make sense if Ukrainians were suicidal enough to actually even consider attacking Russia.
When you consider yourself a minority and you are convinced you will be wiped out and are thus desperate, it is not uncommon for highly courageous acts to be made.
There are no hard black/white lines in this spectacle.
>They attacked very few targets on Russian soil
I challenge you to differentiate between attacking a nation, and attacking a nations citizens, and justify those legislative positions which allow this difference to be attained, across a spectrum of international sovereign nations' own laws on the protection of their citizens.
It is specious to assume, for example, that the USA are the only nation that would bomb other countries in order to protect their citizens' interests.
> From the point of view of morality, I'm of the opinion that Russia did it. Even if Ukraine actually pulled the trigger.
Are you talking about the war at large or about the specific question who blew up the dam?
I'd agree with the sibling comment here. In war, morality is always crystal clear for the parties that are at war - we are the good guys, the others are the bad guys. I'd go out on a limb and say this is almost a requirement to be able to fight a war in the first place: If you didn't think you are in the right, how would you even motivate your own troops to risk their lives for your cause?
Usually, when historians look back at the war later, they find the actual morality to be anything but clear.
> if you and your buddy get into someone's house to rob it in the middle of the night, and the homeowner gets his revolver and shoots your buddy dead, and you run out and the police catch you, it will be you that will be prosecuted for murder. You created the situation that led to the end result.
This isn't how it works. In this case, you have two separate crimes - robbery and murder - with two different perpetrators - the burglars and the homeowner.
The homeowner has a good chance that his charge will be dropped as a case of self-defence - but in no way would the robbers suddenly end up with a murder charge against themselves because they are "obviously" the bad guys.
(And by the way, the homeowner might in fact be prosecuted for murder if it turned out there was no self-defence situation and he just shot the robber out of rage.
You can use this to counter the russian argument too, btw: Even if you assume, for the sake of the argument, that Russia was threatened by an expanding NATO and by a militarized Ukraine, is it still "self-defence" to invade - and keep invading - a country, annexing land, attacking power stations and grain storage sites?)
Or rather, ask the Iraqi or Afghani or Syrian or Libyan or Somalian, or Yemeni people, if they think the US and the West are the 'good guys'.
This is purile argumentation. The West, by statistic, are not the good guys. Neither are Russia.
The closest 'good guys' we've got are nations like Austria, who only send their military for the purpose of observing the war crimes of the other belligerents...
Fully agreed here - just that, from what I understand so far, the global south countries are interested in ending the war as soon as possible, with little regard to the conditions - because the longer the war will go on, the further the food crisis will worsen for them.
In contrast, Ukraine and the West are interested in a full Ukrainian victory, even if it takes a long time.
in many US states if you and your buddy get into someone's house to rob it in the middle of the night, and the homeowner gets his revolver and shoots your buddy dead, and you run out and the police catch you, it will be you that will be prosecuted for murder.
It is "apparently" because important details are unclear e.g. if the Russians placed the explosives and the Ukrainians inadvertently set them off since there was fighting in the area.
Blowing up a large dam that is structurally sound is not something that happens accidentally. It would have required the Russians to place truly massive amounts of explosives at critical points within the dam's structure, which they did control at the time. That is an intentionally engineered situation. It does not imply that they intentionally or accidentally set them off.
Ukraine had little capacity to do real damage to the dam. Artillery shells will not do much more than scratch the paint. The highly specialized capabilities required to do more damage are not available to Ukraine nor would the battlefield conditions have allowed them to operate these capabilities even if they did have them.
First, you have to be aware that it is a warzone, making independent information verification allmost impossible. And propaganda is happening on all sides.
Second, the russians had allmost nothing to gain from blowing it up. The regions east of the river were hit way harder and now the crimea water supply is threatened and the conquered nuclear power plant is rendered worthless.
Now the russians surely are not rational all the time, so it still might have been them - but the reason might have been also simply incompetence. If you look at the water levels, they were rising a lot before (and they were not regulating it, like it happened before). And the dam was already damaged from shelling. So it is possible that the increased water pressure caused something to break violently which can sound like an explosion and then the rest just followed.
The main argument against this theory is the timing, as the ukrainian counteroffensive just started before. Now blowing up the dam does not make much sense strategically, rather the opposite as lots of russian trenches and minefields were flooded and negated as well(and not on the western side), but it might have been a panic reaction, with someone messing things up along the chain of command.
It really needs to be stated that the dams destruction is a massive catastrophe for Ukraine, and as much as people say "Russia had no reason to do it", Ukraine had far far less reason to do it.
It provides water for drinking and heavy industry and agriculture for the entire central part of the country most of which is still under Ukrainian control. Lots of manufacturing capacity that was still online, had to be shut down. It still caused a ton of damage in Kherson, and the Russian positions it "destroyed" are irrelevant because Ukraine hasn't actually made any big push to the other side there, just some minor skirmishes. And Russia has now had, at this point, plenty of time to rebuild those positions. So Ukraine is going to be eating an economic cost of billions or tens of billions, and gained nothing from the destruction of the dam.
The most likely cause is that Russia had prepped it for demolition in case of a significant Ukrainian attack across the river, and then either misinterpreted a small attack or triggered it by accident.
So what do you say to the fact, that due to height differences, the east, under russian control(with no immediate threat of being conquered) was hit way harder? The nuclear plant, the water supply to crimea? As of russian position, they are russian motherland since last autumn. So no matter how fake the referendum was, from their point of view, they were hurting themself.
But sure, it is a massive catastrophe for Ukraine, like the whole war is.
I say that unless the fact that the Russian side was lower resulted in meaningful military benefits for Ukraine, it's basically irrelevant. Russia lost some equipment but not really that much. Not enough to come even close to making it worth it for Ukraine, or enough to refute the idea that Russia did it.
Since when has Russia ever been terribly concerned with "hurting itself" if they thought it would hurt the enemy too. And I just explained why this hurts Ukraine badly.
"The destruction of the dam, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a news conference a week after the event, "ruined their counteroffensive in this direction." It was a comment that didn’t fit particularly well with his claim that the Ukrainians had destroyed the dam themselves."
>> “If Russia invades — that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine — then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
But of course this is a totally different thing, amirite?
Nord Stream 2 did "end" the same day that Russia invaded. Its approval was revoked by the German government, as per the agreement that had been negotiated with the German government in exchange for the US dropping sanctions on the project.
> It is clear who is guilty. The Ukrainian side strived for this.
> You know, I won't say 100 percent things right now that I'm not sure about. By and large, we did not record any large explosions before the destruction occurred. In any case, that's what they reported to me. But they purposefully hit the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station repeatedly with HIMARS - that’s what it’s all about. Maybe they had some kind of backfill there, I don’t know now, maybe they once again added something insignificant, and destruction began.
> But as we understand, we are definitely not interested in this, because these will have dire consequences for those territories that we control and which are Russian. This is the first.
> And the second. Unfortunately, I’ll say a strange thing, but nevertheless, unfortunately, this thwarted their counteroffensive in this direction. Unfortunately - why? Because it would be better if they attacked there. It’s better for us, because it would be very bad for them to attack there. But since such a spill occurred, then, accordingly, the offensive did not take place.
> The Ministry of Emergency Situations and the military are working actively there, as well as local authorities. All people will be provided with assistance in accordance with Russian legislation and standards.
>> For clarity: I still do not rule out the possibility that the Russians may have dealt an additional blow to the Kakhovka dam in phase 4, but the dam was actually so severely damaged four days before the collapse that it was beyond saving
> Second, the russians had allmost nothing to gain from blowing it up.
Well, they didn't gain much from shelling power plants in the winter but they did it anyway. They wasted many missiles on it, some civilians died, but in the end the result gave them no significant advantage. Why did they do it? Well, because Putin still has the mentality of a street bully - if he can inflict suffering on someone who is weaker, he will, whether it makes sense or not.
No need to even resort to personality attacks on Putin; the actions of Russian forces in Ukraine are clearly shaping up to be more of a state level attempt to undermine future potential for Ukraine than they are an attempt to "improve" Russia by taking territory, or "helping" Russian speakers in Ukrainian territory.
Putin/Lavrov cannot afford for Ukraine to be a long term success, another East Slavic, ex-Soviet rival to their own regime and not under their domination.
Mass minefields, constant artillery bombardment, destruction of civilian targets/infrastructure, confiscation of assets, children. The goal is not to win, but to ruin Ukraine and drain its resources and future prospects. "If we can't dominate it and control it and profit from it, then nobody else will.". The speaker of the Duma stated this explicitly last week:
> Putin/Lavrov cannot afford for Ukraine to be a long term success, another East Slavic rival to their own regime not under their domination.
I think this is also some of the logic of the PRC w.r.t. Taiwan. Who in the PRC wants to concede that the Chinese diaspora is huge and that it can contain a multitude of sociopolitical systems ?
Much as American states are the "laboratories of democracy".
Yes, absolutely. I tend to think of it like this: we are not talking about a bipolar world which is "the-west" vs "not-the-west"; we are instead talking about two visions of modernism emerging out of the enlightenment and the development of modernity: one that emphasizes some democracy and chaotic diversity and another that emphasizes uniformity and control. (The market economy is perhaps parallel to this, both visions can accommodate a capitalist market system.) Multiparty, ethnic diversity, multicultural vs single-leader national chauvinism, etc.
There are ideological proponents of either vision within both "east" and "west." But the crisis in Ukraine has erupted in such a way that it is effectively counterpoising one against the other.
That is not to say that the ruling parties in Ukraine are in any way pro "ethnic diversity" and "democratic"; they are in large part old school national chauvinist and fairly corrupt. But in resisting singular Russian hegemony the Ukrainian people are in large part appealing to something far more anti-oppressive.
Unfortunately we need some term to express what is happening; this is similar to using the terms "Germans" and "Nazis" interchangeably when speaking about WW2. For sure it's not true that all Russians support the war; many are against. Yet, these are Russian soldiers who are killing innocent Ukrainians. If we use the term "Russians", this bundles these two reinforcing the Putinist idea that "Russia is me" and that the war is one behalf of all Russia and all Russians. This big lie will have great consequences for the future so maybe using the term "Ruzzian" for the population supporting the atrocities of war is not such a bad solution.
Interesting theory. But I like it. There were soviets. I am one of them. Then there were russians. And now we have ruzzians. Russians could live in oil wealth like Saudis. But they went for ruzzians and that makes me sad.
No doubt it was the Russians, same as with blowing up the Nordstream pipeline and shelling the Zaporozhia nuclear plant. There was absolutely no shelling of the dam from the Ukrainian side and numerous threats to blow it up when the Russians held both sides of the river. It's in the Russian's best interest to deny water supply to Crimea, cooling to the Zaporozhia nuclear plant, and to flood the left bank (which is much lower than the right one) to clear most of prepared defensive structures and mine fields. /s
How much explosives do you need to destroy a Soviet reinforced dam like this? Several tons at least, perfectly placed. These mammoths were built to withstand American nukes.
If the Ukrainians did it, they were able to smuggle a fantastic amount of explosives under the Russians' noses into Russian-controlled territory and then blow it up, without any cars or mechanization. Impressive ninjas.
With underwater explosion in the direct proximity you do not need that much, especially if you will use a charge with explosively formed penetrator. 16 meters of water pressure will quickly exploit even a small hole. My guess, it's small enough to be deliverable by a remotely controlled boat like those used by Ukraine to attack the Russian fleet, naval bases and the Crimean bridge.
> Given the satellite and seismic detections of explosions in the area, by far the most likely cause of the collapse was an explosive charge placed in the maintenance passageway, or gallery, that runs through the concrete heart of the structure, according to two American engineers, an expert in explosives and a Ukrainian engineer with extensive experience with the dam’s operations.
https://twitter.com/osintjourno/status/1682342248187416576