The Collapse of Kakhovka Dam

Southern Ukraine faces ecological and humanitarian disasters following the mysterious destruction of a Russian-controlled dam.

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Happy Thursday! The Dispatch softball team remains undefeated!

Sure, our first game was postponed last night due to a code red air quality alert in D.C.—but we’ve got a big old zero in the loss column.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories  

  • Smoke from more than 400 wildfires in Canada—which have forced 120,000 Canadians to evacuate—is blanketing much of the Northeast, placing nearly 100 million people in 18 states under air quality alerts. In New York City yesterday, the Air Quality Index topped 400 out of 500, the worst in the world, and the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded flights at LaGuardia Airport due to low visibility. The White House has deployed more than 600 U.S. firefighters and support personnel to Canada, along with equipment to help quench the fires, but the National Weather Service predicts little improvement today.
  • Former Vice President Mike Pence announced Wednesday he’s running for president, promising to uphold the Constitution and arguing Donald Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021, disqualified him for the presidency. Pence also portrayed himself as more traditionally conservative than other candidates on abortion, spending, and foreign policy, pledging continued support for Ukraine and exhibiting a willingness to reform Social Security and Medicare to address the national debt. He’s currently polling under 4 percent nationally to Trump’s 53 percent. Former software executive and current North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum also announced Wednesday he’s running for the GOP presidential nomination, highlighting his experience passing pension reform, term limits, and tax cuts.
  • Prosecutors have reportedly informed Trump’s legal team he’s the target of a criminal investigation—a step that often, though not always, precedes an indictment—over his mishandling of classified documents. Special counsel Jack Smith has been investigating the handling of documents, as well as Trump’s efforts to remain in office after the 2020 election. A federal grand jury in Florida has reportedly been hearing testimony on the latter investigation, and former White House official Steve Bannon has been subpoenaed to testify. The news comes one day after the New York Times reported former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows had testified before a grand jury as part of Smith’s probe.
  • Former Attorney General Bill Barr contradicted Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin’s recent claim that the Trump Department of Justice had closed an investigation into bribery allegations against then-Vice President Joe Biden that are now at the center of a dispute between House Republicans and the FBI. “On the contrary, it was sent to Delaware for further investigation,” Barr said on Wednesday. Republican House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer on Wednesday dropped plans to hold FBI head Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress after Wray agreed to let the full committee see a document detailing the bribery allegations, plus two related documents. Previously, only Comer and Raskin, his Democratic counterpart, had been allowed to view the report.
  • The Commerce Department reported Wednesday the United States’ imports rose 1.5 percent in April from March to a seasonally adjusted $323.6 billion, reflecting higher prices from ongoing inflation as well as rising demand for cars and car parts, industrial supplies, and cell phones and household goods. The proportion of goods imported from China dropped to 15.4 percent over the year ending in April, the lowest level since October 2006. U.S. exports, meanwhile, fell 3.6 percent amid softening global demand. 
  • President Biden on Wednesday vetoed a Republican-led resolution that would have blocked his plan to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student loans per borrower. It’s the fifth veto of Biden’s presidency—and comes as the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of the plan. Loan payments are set to resume in August.
  • House leadership has canceled votes for the rest of the week as several hardline GOP lawmakers deployed stall tactics to protest the debt ceiling deal Speaker Kevin McCarthy brokered with Democrats. The members reportedly want to renegotiate the deal struck in January to give McCarthy the speakership gavel, though McCarthy said they hadn’t offered specific demands. 
  • Portland, Oregon’s city council voted 3-1 to drop its rarely enforced ban on camping on public property, instead allowing overnight camping provided campers don’t block private property, schools, or businesses. Three-time violators of the restrictions may face fines and up to 30-day prison terms. The homeless population in Oregon climbed nearly 23 percent from 2020 to 2022, and a state law taking effect July 1 requires cities and counties to adopt “objectively reasonable” rules for what homeless people can do on public property, codifying a federal court ruling banning local governments from arresting people for sleeping rough if the municipality offers insufficient shelter capacity.
  • Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Wednesday his nation will open 10 new embassies in Africa—starting in Rwanda and Mozambique—and will increase agricultural exports and military cooperation on the continent. Ukraine’s efforts to strengthen ties follow some African nations’ reluctance to oppose Russia’s invasion. South Africa, for instance, abstained from a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s aggression, has since conducted naval exercises with Russia, and has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to a summit in August despite an international warrant against him.

Dam Russians

A view from the roof of residential building on flooded area of Kherson on June 7. (Photo by Yan Dobronosov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)
A view from the roof of residential building on flooded area of Kherson on June 7. (Photo by Yan Dobronosov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)

In the summer of 1941, Joseph Stalin’s secret police committed what one British war correspondent called an “unparalleled stroke of patriotic destruction”: blowing up the Dnipro Dam near Zaporizhzhia in Soviet-era Ukraine to slow the Nazi advance. An official death toll was never released, but thousands of civilians are believed to have died in the resulting flooding. “People were screaming for help,” one eyewitness told a Ukrainian TV station decades later. “Cows were mooing, pigs were squealing. People were climbing on trees.”

The Russian playbook may not have changed much in the intervening 82 years. In the early hours of Tuesday morning—June 6, when much of the world commemorates D-Day, the beginning of the operation that would liberate Europe during World War II—Ukraine’s Kakhovka Dam, under Russian control, burst. The cause of the dam’s failure is still unknown with both sides of the conflict blaming one another, but the flooding only compounds humanitarian and environmental disasters ravaging the war-torn country—and does so just as Ukraine is beginning its counteroffensive against the invading Russian forces.

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  1. Rob

    Does the Dispatch actually have a softball team? Are there enough employees in one city for that?

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    Dave in Houston

    I think Nick-a-pundit's analysis of the Ukrainian dam destruction was spot-on. Is it inconceivable that the Ukrainians did it? No, but it doesn't seem like the most likely explanation.

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  3. Scianti7

    "Across political, geographic, and generational lines, people agree that their fellow humans just aren’t as moral as they used to be. But a new study published in Nature suggests there’s no clear evidence of this broad-based moral decline and argues biased memory might be causing the misperception."

    Thank you for covering this. The misperception is annoying. I would challenge anyone to come up with more "moral" time than the current era, there isn't one. Humans have been the same for a very long time. (Though for the last couple hundred years we don't always seem as quick to kill each other, at least it isn't as widespread. The middle ages & dark ages were probably quite terrible.) Many older folks in many generations have thought the world was getting worse, it isn't. It does get more complex. We will probably never again see the high crime stats of the 1980s & 1990s simply because we don't have the same exposure to led. The 50s are extremely problematic, "picnic lynchings"...

    There are people & at least one news network tryingvto cultivate that narrative. The statistics don't show it to be true, & it ignores all the advances in different areas.

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      Dave in Houston

      I often argue that there has never been a time in human history when more people were more prosperous and more free.

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      1. Scianti7

        In some ways yes. Life is more complicated though, & for some they feel less free. But I think it depends what you're looking at & how you're looking.

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  4. Philip.R.M.Hunt

    LUK: Too little evidence to do more than guess as to who blew the dam. My best guess would be it was a Russian accident. A drunk or panicking Russkie maybe? It really was not in either side's interest to do this. Yeah, since the US now thinks that Ukraine did the Nord stream and Kremlin attacks, I wouldn't rule that Ukraine had a hand in blowing up the dam, though it would have been more like they paid some Russian to do it for them. That way they can say the Russians did it. Hard to see if what advantage it would gain the Ukrainians unless they know something we don't. I want Ukraine to win and drive out the Russians, so if they did do it and had a good reason, I likely would not judge them harshly for it.

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  5. Mark Holmlund

    The maps the last two days are great!

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    Edwinpace

    This is the beginning of the Russian withdrawal. His line won't hold and Crimea is next.

    They will destroy everything they can, because for Putin's base it's not how well off you are, but how worse off everyone else is. The level of destruction will depend on how much time the Russians have to plant explosives and wreck everything.

    Russian TV has been prepping people for this. Commentators routinely say Kyiv must be levelled and all Ukrainians killed.

    Putin will try to keep his base on side, by showing them how much damage they're doing to Ukraine.

    The only question now is: will they swallow it?

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  7. Neelthakrebew

    The Ukrainians did not blow up the dam.

    It has been widely reported that there was an explosion that broke windows 40 km away. How could Ukraine sneak in that much explosive into a Russian controlled facility?

    The flooding downstream is at best the mildest sort of distraction given that the counteroffensive is taking place miles away in Zaporizhia. You'd think Ukraine would create a distraction that would directly affect the Russians they are currently attacking.

    It's either accidental due to previous damage, or it's the Russkies.

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  8. Stand-Up Philosopher

    Who is responsible for the dam? Russia. Period.

    Ditto to everything BusyBusyBee and Ethan Cordray said, with a few additional points:
    - Small point: Norwegian seismologists, using data from a seismic array in Romania, say there was an explosion (as opposed to a simple collapse).
    - Bigger point: The dam was made to withstand strategic bombing... but also to be blown from the inside if needed; Soviets wanted to keep their options open, and there were apparently special spaces inside to load explosives for precisely that purpose. Access to the inside of the dam since February 2022 has been controlled exclusively by Russia.
    - Links for both of the above at https://twitter.com/dkaleniuk/status/1666762877217259523
    - There were intel reports of Russia loading explosives inside the dam last October, while Surovikin and Saldo "speculated" publicly that the Ukrainians might try to blow the dam, setting up a false flag. ISW wrote at the time that this was likely the Russian plan.
    - Would the Russians really let a reservoir build up and then blow the dam holding it back? Well, as the counteroffensive begins, that's exactly what they've been doing elsewhere on the southern front. Wild coincidence, I'm sure. https://khpg.org/en/1608812358
    - As a thought experiment, how might Ukraine have done this without access to the interior spaces? Maybe construct a large brick of high explosives about the size of a municipal bus, float it down the river, and detonate it? Several problems with that. While nearby residents did report hearing an explosion, the amount of HE required to do this from the outside would have been heard regionally, and a minor tsunami would have been noticed travelling back upstream. Furthermore, one early report mentioned that 11 of 28 spans had failed. Perhaps some gave way in a sort of domino effect from the water pouring through, but such a wide breach would be difficult to achieve with one (albeit huge) chunk of explosives, and sounds more like a controlled demolition from the inside.
    - I don't think Zelenskyy's perfect, but I can't imagine him ordering something like this, or the necessary number of people carrying it out without stopping it. But even if Zelenskyy were that cold-blooded, consider that Ukrainians are incandescently livid about this: to get caught doing something like this would not simply get him thrown out of office, but very possibly Ceausescu'd. But Putin? We're talking about a guy who blew up a couple of apartment buildings on Moscow in order to blame it on the Chechens, and a thousand other things.

    As predicted over seven months ago, it was the Russians.

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    🐝 BusyBusyBee 🐝

    QOTD: Whether Russia planted and detonated explosives or it was carelessness due to previously inflicted damage, Russia singularly had control over the power plant part of the dam. The internal part of the dam could only be reached from the Russian side as they blew the road on the Ukrainian side when they retreated from Kherson last year.

    Russia firing on rescuers is par for the course. Ukrainians, using drones to assess the damage and spotting people on roofs in Russian held territory and dropping them bottles of water while they waited for rescue is par for the course for them. You tell me, who blew the dam?

    And this situation, aside from pulling certain resources away from supporting roles for the counteroffensive, should have little impact to Ukraine’s plans. From everything I’ve seen and read, they’re either going to go south through Melitopol’ to Mariupol to break the Russian “land bridge” to Crimea or up in Luhansk., They’re also already retaking territory around Bakhmut and there is fighting at many points across the line of contact across the Donbas. They’ve been using Stormshadow cruise missiles to take our Russian logistics behind enemy lines, etc.

    Slava Ukraini! 🇺🇦

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  10. Craig B.

    Declan Garvey, did you order the Code Red? I want the truth!

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