Blowing up the Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power station is a crime that may look senseless. But only to those who didn’t grow up on the wrong side of the tracks, aka Russia.
Those who, like me, had that unfortunate experience will recognise the pattern.
At the time Putin grew up in inner city Leningrad and I in the Moscow equivalent, those places were overrun with street gangs. No youngster could survive unless he ran either with the gangs or from them. Putin chose the first method, I the second. Yet neither one was foolproof by itself.
For example, while I ran from some gangs, I still had to find an accommodation with some others. Most of my accommodations were cultural: Russian thugs love stories. Since they usually don’t read them, they have a use for those who do.
Well-read youngsters like me could curry favour with the muggers, bandits and killers by telling them stories based on various romantic novels, mostly those by Alexandre Dumas and Sir Walter Scott. That cast us in the role of some kind of court jesters.
Sometimes I’d add erotic details the authors had carelessly omitted but my audience demanded (“So did Ivanhoe screw Lady Rowena?”). I’d helpfully provide the rather pornographic touches they craved, of the kind that would have got Messrs Dumas and Scott arrested had they put them into their narratives.
That saved me from violent abuse, but not entirely. An ‘intel’ (their term for the likes of me) still had to show heart by fighting occasionally, win, lose or draw. There he converged with actual thugs like Vlad Putin, who also had to earn their spurs by taking on members of other gangs or sometimes their own.
Since both he and I were of small stature, we had to rely on unconventional martial techniques, such as half a brick on the head or a pencil in the eye. Typically, a threat alone sufficed, provided it was credible. To that end, an enterprising lad would brandish the weapon and scream “I’m a psycho!”
That meant there was no limit to the kind of crazy things he could do to anyone he perceived as a threat. Usually the potential assailant would back off – who knew what that so-and-so would do. Better safe than sorry.
One can detect that sort of thing in Vlad’s order to blow up the Kakhovka power station, an action that at first glance looks at least as damaging to Russia as to the Ukraine.
(Since that area has been in Russian hands since the start of the war, and the Russians mined the station back in November, only some of our hacks may doubt it was the Russians who pushed the button. And no such action would have been carried out without a direct order from the Kremlin.)
The destruction of the dam may slow down or delay the incipient Ukrainian offensive, but it won’t stop it in its tracks. The Ukrainians can no longer ford the Dnieper close to its delta and attack in the Mariupol direction – the whole area south of the river has been turned into a swamp impassable for the Ukrainian armour.
Then again, it’s doubtful that the Ukrainian high command ever saw that direction as a promising strategic avenue. For one thing the Dnieper is very wide close to its mouth, between 4,000 and 7,000 metres. Getting an armoured brigade across would have been a perilous undertaking even had that dam remained intact. After all, the Russians had been busily fortifying the area, and the crossing troops would have been exposed to murderous artillery fire.
Now all those expensive fortifications have been swept away, but then they are no longer needed. A modern army can’t launch a frontal attack through a swamp.
A Ukrainian offensive will now be more sluggish even upstream of Kakhovka: the whole left bank of the Dnieper is lower than the right one and hence will suffer some flooding. Yet the Ukrainian General Staff will probably regard this as merely a nuisance, rather than as a deterrent. The offensive will have to be modified, but it won’t be cancelled.
On the other hand, the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe is huge – on both sides of the conflict. Vast areas of the Ukraine will lose much of their water supply, with dire effects on agricultural output.
Most immediately, up to 80 villages and towns will be flooded, affecting hundreds of thousands of people who will lose their houses and everything in them. How many will die is hard to tell – some 40,000 have already been evacuated.
When the retreating Soviets blew up the Dnieper dam and power station in 1941, the number of casualties is variously estimated between 20,000 and 100,000. And when in 1943 the RAF launched its celebrated Dam Busters Raid in the Ruhr Valley, some 600 Germans and 1,000 slave workers died.
The current action can have even more catastrophic consequences. For one thing, if the mainland Ukrainians lose some of their water supply, the population of the Crimea will lose almost all of it. Considering that securing that water supply was one of the reasons for the war the Russians cited, blowing up the Kakhovka dam looks counterproductive.
Even more potentially cataclysmic is the threat to the Zaporozhe nuclear power station, the biggest in Europe. The destroyed hydroelectric station provided the water needed to cool the reactors, which is essential for preventing a meltdown. The Zaporozhe station has its own reservoir, which will do for a while. How long a while is open to question.
Should a meltdown occur, the consequences can be worse than Chernobyl. Then the wind was blowing in the northwesterly direction, which is why Minsk was affected more than Kiev. God alone knows the wind direction should the Zaporozhe station suffer a meltdown. Poor mortals, such as Vlad, have to assume it may blow eastwards just as easily as westwards.
All things considered, the whole action seems irrational. Its military upshot hurts both sides about equally, and one can even argue that the Russians, who have lost billions of dollars’ worth of fortifications, will suffer more.
The Ukrainian side will suffer the greater humanitarian damage, but the Russians won’t escape it either. The country’s reputation will be hit even harder – every Western Putinversteher, with the possible exception of Peter Hitchens, will now realise that both Putin and his country are beyond the pale.
As an immediate result of that realisation, Nato may well remove all stops in the way of arms supplies to the Ukraine, along with its objections to Ukrainian forays into Russian territory. In short, the net effect of this crime is predictably negative for Russia.
So why did Vlad decide to commit it? Simple. He has reverted to that little Vova Putin who knew he had no chance against the big boys. So he waved a brick around, screaming “I’m a psycho!” Except that in this case the big boys, the Ukrainians, aren’t going to retreat.
Nor would I put it past Vlad to blow up the Zaporozhe nuclear power station either. That way he’d use nuclear weapons without using them, nominally speaking. And his claim to mental instability would carry even more weight.
Putin and his generals know they are losing the war. Their only hope is to scare the West into cutting off all assistance to the Ukraine. That’s unlikely to happen now, but should an American Putinversteher become president, and his British counterpart prime minister, things may change.
Will Putin use nuclear weapons as a last resort? Most commentators doubt that, but perhaps fewer now than a week ago. My hope is that Nato governments and generals have contingency plans for that eventuality – and that one of those plans involves taking out Vlad the Dam Buster.
“that the Russians, who have lost billions of dollars’ worth of fortifications, will suffer more.”
Massive flooding of itself can be understood as a form of fortification. But Alex is right. The Russian has put a lot of time, money and effort into fortifications the left bank of the Dneiper.