Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam break has caused a propaganda leak
‘Life goes on...shops are open,’ says Russian standing next to 12 feet of water.
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If the Russians are good at anything, it’s propaganda. Putin and his henchmen have managed to convince swaths of the country that the war in Ukraine is about liberating it from the grip of neo-Nazis and the evil organization NATO. Now they’re doing their worst to minimize the catastrophic breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam in the Kherson region.
While they have denied just about every murder and case of torture in this war, what’s happening in the video below is just … beyond.
Speaking is Volodymyr Saldo, the head of the occupied Kherson region. He is a collaborator — before the war he spent a decade as the mayor of the city of Kherson. Here, standing in front of a wall of water in central Nova Kakhovka, he’s saying that people in cities across the region are totally fine:
“The city of Nova Kakhovka and all the cities downstream — Oleshki, Hola Prystan, and the city of Kherson and other settlements — life goes on there. People walk the streets. I’ve just been driving [there]. Gas stations are working, some shops are open.”
Nothing to see here, folks.
To make a horrible situation worse, Russians are stopping people on the occupied left-bank of the Kherson region from evacuating if they don’t have Russian passports, reports Zmina, a Kyiv-based human rights group.
“We set gathering points in Oleshki, Kakhovka, Nova Kakhovka, Gola Prystan — they have no chance anymore,” a Zmina volunteer said. The surrounding roads are flooded.
“Currently, it is no longer possible to evacuate many people.”
The volunteers say that, as of right now in Oleshki, water is up to or over the roof of houses. Anyone who hasn’t evacuated is waiting on these roofs.
Meanwhile, the international press is dithering on who or what caused the dam to collapse. Was it the Russians, the Ukrainians, or simply a catastrophic structural failure? The Associated Press is toeing the hard and fast “just the facts, ma’am” line with: “It was not possible to reconcile the conflicting claims.”
Maybe not yet, but we should know soon. And I can’t help but wonder if it is related to this alleged threat I wrote about a couple weeks ago. The Ukrainian Main Directorate of Intelligence had said that the Russians were planning to attack the Kherson region’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and claim Ukraine was responsible. Afterward, Russia would announce that the attack resulted in a leak of radioactive materials.
But a Russian group that works with open-source intelligence (OSINT), the Conflict Intelligence Team, said that it’s possible the Russians didn’t directly target the dam, but that it collapsed due to the criminal negligence of the occupying authorities.
Somebody certainly did something — whether that was target the dam or allow it to fall due to severe neglect — that is against the Geneva Conventions, and I don’t think it takes a genius to figure out who, exactly, destroyed thousands of livelihoods and set off what President Volodymyr Zelensky called “an environmental bomb of mass destruction.”
Some of the consequences of the dam breach, via BBC:
Ukrainian hydro power dam operator UkrHydroEnerho said the Nova Kakhovka station was “fully destroyed” and could not be restored.
The river has also been contaminated with 150 tons of industrial lubricant, said Zelensky, and another 300 tons was at risk of leaking.
There are concerns about desertification, with agricultural land washed away by flood waters and the negative consequences of the flooding likely to be felt for years.
Ukraine's agriculture ministry said 10,000 hectares of agricultural land on the Ukrainian-controlled side of the Dnipro had been flooded, and several times more on the Russian-occupied.
At the same time some 94 percent of irrigation systems for agriculture in Kherson region were now without a water source, the ministry added.
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Right. There is definitely life as usual going on. All underwater.
Maybe the leak pun is too soon?