Compelling thoughts from Ukraine’s dam chief on who’s behind the breach

‘Professionals in the industry understand perfectly well what happened.’

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made. 

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A man in his yard in Afanasiyivka, Mykolayiv region, today. (Photo by OLEKSII FILIPPOV/AFP via Getty Images)

While the world — and the media — equivocates on who caused the Kakhovka dam in the occupied Kherson region of Ukraine to burst on Tuesday, the Ukrainian government has no doubt that the breach was perpetrated by the Russians. The dam, they say, did not collapse. It was blown up. Even if it simply collapsed, the dam has been under the control of the occupying Russian forces for months, so it’s still their responsibility.

There is no death count as of yet, but hundreds of thousands of people have been left without safe drinking water, and tens of thousands of acres of land have been swamped, according to Ukrainian officials. Also, they say that more than 1.2 million formerly extremely fertile acres are likely to desertify from a lack of irrigation.

A spokesman with the UN human rights office told reporters yesterday that the Russians are denying human rights monitors access to the Russian-occupied areas that have been flooded. Russia claims it has evacuated a few thousand people already, but there has been no independent confirmation of this. (Russian propaganda has been rife.) And Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky said that the Russian authorities were “not even trying to help people.” He also told a German outlet on Wednesday that soldiers are actually shooting at Ukrainian rescuers.

Yesterday, the New Voice of Ukraine, one of country’s largest private media outlets, published an interview with Ihor Syrota, the head of the state-owned company that administers the dam and other hydroelectric plants. I’ve got some of the highlights for you below. He is very clear that he knows what happened, and offers some compelling thoughts. Keep in mind, however, that none of what he asserts has been independently verified yet by engineers.

Syrota [in translation, and edited for clarity and length]:

Professionals in the industry understand perfectly well what happened. They understand it perfectly. But if we [look at] the political discussions, it is different there. And I believe that I, for example, am not a politician and do not want to be interpreted as a politician. I am not an environmentalist and I do not want to be interpreted as an environmentalist. But I have been the head of these stations for more than 13 years, and I perfectly understand.

We also have all the calculations about what happened there. In order to achieve the kind of “success” we have seen there, it was necessary to plant hundreds of kilograms of explosives in the places that will be pointed to by the engineers who design dams and have an understanding of where and how, and how much, should be planted to deliver such a devastating blow.

If [the Russians] say there was a [Ukrainian] missile … I want to emphasize, the station was designed for a nuclear attack. It was designed to withstand a 7.0 earthquake. To cause such damage, there would need to be at least three aerial bombs of 500 kilograms each dropped in one exact place. We all understand that this did not happen.