Kiev’s Alleged Proof That Russia Blew Up The Kakhovka Dam Doesn’t Stand Up To Scrutiny
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | JUNE 9, 2023
The Ukrainian secret police claimed on Friday to have intercepted a call between two Russian soldiers where one of them allegedly admitted that their side blew up the Kakhovka Dam. That person explicitly denied that Kiev was responsible and instead said that it was a false flag attack by Russia’s own troops that supposedly went awry, which would explain their losses downstream. They also said that the flooding killed thousands of animals in a nearby safari park.
Nobody should believe the account that was shared in this recording since it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. For starters, it’s already suspicious enough that the three talking points made in the recording – that Ukraine wasn’t responsible, Russia staged a false flag that didn’t go according to plan, and thousands of animals also died – perfectly align with Kiev’s official narrative. The chances that one of their opponents echoed all three points in a single secretly recorded conversation is highly unlikely.
The second reason why this is dubious is because it was shared a day after Foreign Minister Kuleba angrily rejected Turkiye’s pragmatic proposal to form a multilateral committee for investigating the Kakhovka Dam’s destruction. Kiev would have certainly known that refusing to participate in a truly neutral investigation into this war crime would make their side look guilty, which explains why they fabricated this recording in order to desperately divert attention towards Russia instead.
And finally, the global media attention that this recording just generated serves to drown out the discussion that Tucker Carlson sparked in the first episode of his new show on Twitter where he informed the 110 million people who watched it about a damning Washington Post report from December. Ukrainian Major General Andrey Kovalchuk not only admitted to plotting the exact same terrorist attack that happened half a year later, but even to testing its viability with US-supplied HIMARS missiles.
The content, timing, and context within which the Ukrainian secret police just shared their alleged proof that Russia blew up the Kakhovka Dam are all questionable in and of themselves, let alone when taken together. No honest observer would extend credence to this recording, which is arguably fabricated for the reasons that were explained. Those who sincerely want to know the truth about what happened should pressure Ukraine to join Turkiye’s proposed UN-led multilateral investigation committee.
Kuleba’s innuendo that the deck would be stacked against Kiev in the event that it participates in a UN-led investigation is discredited by the fact that this global body has consistently taken its side in every one of its disputes against Russia since the start of the special operation. Unlike UNGA votes where countries can be bribed or pressured to influence the political outcome of this process, however, no such trickery can take place in an evidence-driven investigation where Russia participates as an equal party.
Ukraine knows that Turkiye’s proposal would prove that it blew up the Kakhovka Dam exactly as Kovalchuk admitted to the Washington Post that Kiev had been plotting to do since late last year, which is why it refuses to join and instead fabricated this “evidence” as its excuse. Nevertheless, Russia, Turkiye, and other UN members can still proceed with this investigation even without Ukraine if they have the will to do so, but the West might claim that it’s “illegitimate” so long as Kiev isn’t involved.
In the court of public opinion, however, Ukraine comes off as guilty by refusing to participate in a truly neutral investigation into this war crime. Having its infamously corrupt secret police share a suspicious recording that coincidentally echoes all three of Kiev’s talking points and then claiming that the case is closed on this issue isn’t something that someone who’s innocent would do. Anyone who claims otherwise has an agenda in gaslighting others in order to cover up for Kiev’s culpability in this war crime.
The Middle East and US Terrorist Activities
By Viktor Mikhin – New Eastern Outlook – 08.06.2023
Incredibly high civilian casualty rates from American-led military adventurism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia have been revealed in a new research by Brown University’s The Cost of War Project in the State of Rhode Island. The report provides direct data on the victims of the war in which nearly a million people were killed by the US efforts.
According to the study, another important aspect that has indirectly killed several million more people is the military destruction of the economy, public services, infrastructure and the environment, which increases the death toll long after the bombs have been dropped and increases over time. The report estimates that these factors contributed to more than 3.5 million deaths. This aspect requires more research, and the project specifically emphasizes that “the many long-term and underestimated consequences of war” need to be explored in more detail.
Another study shows that the number of direct casualties from wars that killed nearly a million people is an understatement, which the report again refers to by saying that “the exact death toll remains unknown.” In another section of the project’s report on the Iraqi death toll, it says that “estimates of the Iraqi war death toll have been particularly inconsistent. The Lancet 2006 estimated that approximately 600,000 Iraqis died as a result of military violence between 2003 and 2006.” The report goes on to say that the controversy over conflicting reports about the death toll in Iraq stems from news reports estimates, with some exaggerating the death toll while those who supported the illegal invasion downplayed the death toll.
The project cites a report in The Lancet that says the death toll in Iraq since 2003 and in the next three years alone reached 600,000 Iraqis. Various unbiased studies have been conducted, concluding that more than one million Iraqis were killed as a result of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011.
Even the one million mark in Iraqi deaths could be considered an understatement when there were daily reports of almost daily terrorist bombings that killed hundreds of Iraqis. And then, add to that the US and DAESH era from 2014 to 2017, when hundreds of thousands more people were killed, and it’s not hard to imagine that over a million Iraqis have died and continue to die today as a result of the US so-called “war on terror.”
There is no doubt that the US military presence has brought nothing but insecurity and instability to West Asia. In January 2018, Leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei said: “What is important is that the corruptive presence of the US in this region must end… They (Americans) have brought war, discord, sedition and destruction to this region; they brought about destruction of infrastructures. Of course, they do this everywhere in the world… It must be stopped.”
The Cost of War Project’s latest study also warns that “these wars continue to affect millions of people around the world, who live with their consequences and die from them.” The report focuses on the impact of the wars unleashed by the United States on women and children, who “bear the brunt of these ongoing consequences.”
The report notes that while some people have died in combat, many more, especially children, have died as a result of the negative effects of wars, such as the spread of disease and damage to public services. “More research is needed on the impact of the destruction of public services by war, especially outside the health care system, on public health,” the report says. “Damage to water and sanitation systems, roads and commercial infrastructure such as ports, for example, has significant and important negative consequences.”
The study says that the wars and conflicts the United States has fought or been involved in under the pretext of supposedly fighting terrorism since September 11, 2001, clearly show that the consequences of the ongoing violence of war are so vast and complex that they cannot be measured. It should be noted that after the 9/11 attacks, the US waged wars and fomented conflicts, especially in West Asia, under the pretext of fighting terrorism. However, as a result of US military adventurism, there has been an extremely dramatic increase in terrorist groups that had no presence in West Asia or countries such as Somalia prior to Washington’s military intervention in the region.
In other words, the so-called “war on terror” has had the opposite effect from the stated goal of Pentagon’s campaign of instability in West Asia, which has allowed terrorism to flourish. In other words, and many experts agree, the presence of US troops and US policies in the Middle East and other parts of the world have only led to the direct growth of terrorism and terrorist organizations that have destabilized peace and tranquility in those parts of the world.
The report states that the damage and continued deaths caused by the wars mean that those who have unleashed them must take responsibility, including financial responsibility for repairing the damage caused. Suffice it to recall how the American clown of a Secretary of State Colin Powell shook some test tube of incomprehensible white powder on the UN podium and hysterically frightened the whole world with unthinkable troubles from Saddam Hussein. And that was the reason for the barbaric and unjustifiable attack on sovereign Iraq in 2003, from which the Iraqis are still unable to recover and rebuild their state.
Iraqis, and indeed millions of other people, still suffer from distress, pain and trauma in both current and former war zones, according to the study, which calls on the United States as well as its allies to ease the continuing loss and suffering of millions and provide the required “reparations, though not easy, and cheap.” It is something “imperative,” the report notes.
The project correctly and very justifiably blames the US for its role in the military adventurism it embarked on after 9/11, particularly the casualties inflicted during the American two-year war and the 20 year of occupation of Afghanistan. The report focuses on Afghanistan as an example of how people, particularly women and children, the most vulnerable in society, are dying because, despite the indiscriminate withdrawal (or rather shameful flight) of US troops, the damage Washington has done to Afghanistan’s vital services, such as its health sector, sanitation and other infrastructure over 20 years of war and occupation, means that Afghans are still dying today. “Although the United States withdrew military forces from Afghanistan in 2021, officially ending the war that began with its invasion 20 years ago, Afghans are suffering and dying from war-related causes today more often than ever,” the report notes alarmingly.
The Cost of War Project says that much more research is needed to gather more adequate data “to guide life-saving actions.” “More research is needed on the impact of the destruction of public services by war, especially outside the health care system, on public health,” the report notes. “Damage to water and sanitation systems, roads and commercial infrastructure such as ports, for example, has significant consequences.”
In the case of Somalia, for example, the US intervention and the ensuing war prevented the delivery of humanitarian aid, which, according to the study, exacerbated the famine. This is a natural disaster that could have been mitigated if the US had instead chosen to spend a huge amount of money on humanitarian aid programs instead of radicalizing the local population (and increasing terrorism and bloodshed) by bombing civilians with drones. The section of the report reads: “While all belligerents must be held accountable, in the causation sections this report addresses the relevant consequences of the actions of the United States, as the primary power responsible for all these crimes.”
Critics argue that if the United States had not fought wars against West Asian countries or provoked conflicts in the region, other parties would not have participated in any combat missions. In this case, the US should be solely responsible for the disturbing direct and indirect death toll resulting from its provocative and illegal military measures. Washington’s policy of intimidation, military adventurism and terrorism against peace-loving nations of the world must end. And this is the will and aspiration of peoples who want to live in peace and prosperity, without wars and aggressions, and to follow the path of building a new multipolar world, actively promoted by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Deaths confirmed in frontline dam rupture
RT | June 8, 2023
At least five people were killed and 41 were injured in the wake of the breach of the Kakhovka dam, the mayor of the city hosting the damaged structure has said.
“Reports came today that out of the seven people, who were grazing cattle, five died. We are in the process of evacuating the other two,” Novaya Kakhovka Mayor Vladimir Leontyev reported during an interview on Thursday.
The mayor previously advised that seven people were missing in the wake of the frontline dam breach, which occurred early on Tuesday morning. Ukraine and Russia accused each other of destroying it and exposing thousands of people living downstream near the Dnieper River to flooding.
Novaya Kakhovka is located on the left shore of the river and is controlled by Russia, while Ukraine controls the opposite side of the Kherson region. Ukrainian officials said there were some fatalities after the flooding on the right shore as well.
Water levels in the city rose by 12 meters after the dam was breached, before starting to slowly recede by Tuesday evening. Russian authorities estimated that 14 settlements were in the impact area. In addition to the direct damage to buildings, infrastructure and fields, the incident caused the draining of a water reservoir, which was used to feed a canal transporting fresh water to Russia’s Crimea.
Kiev claimed that Russian troops blew up the dam to prevent a possible amphibious operation across the Dnieper in Kherson Region. Ukrainian officials say that charges were planted inside the dam, which the Russian Defense Ministry has denied.
Moscow in turn blamed the Ukrainians, citing their record of shelling the strategically important facility. A Ukrainian general last year confirmed to The Washington Post that Kiev’s forces used US-supplied rocket artillery to hit one of the dam’s floodgates as a dry run for future attacks, should the military deem it necessary to cause a flood.
Russo-Ukrainian War: Dam!
A different kind of leak
BIG SERGE THOUGHT | JUNE 7, 2023
It is probably safe to say that the current week (June 5-11, 2023) is shaping up to be one of the most significant of the entire Russo-Ukrainian War. On Monday, all eyes were on the Ukrainian Armed Forces and their much anticipated summer counteroffensive, which began with a series of battallion level attacks across the breadth of the theater. After these initial assaults in the Ugledar, Bakhmut, and Soledar sectors began to collapse with heavy losses, it looked like the topic of discussion for the forseeable future would be Ukraine’s prospects for breaching strongly held Russian defenses.
Instead, the entire Ukrainian offensive was overshadowed by the sudden and entirely unexpected failure of the dam at Nova Kakhovka on the lower Dneiper.
Let’s be clear about one thing: the destruction of this dam marks a qualitative change in the course of the war; a dam represents an entirely different tier of target. There is a broad sense that dams are not legitimate military targets, as they fall in the category of “objects containing dangerous forces”, along with things like sea walls, dykes, and nuclear power plants. However, attacks on dams are not without precedent, and the legality of such attacks is a complicated and thorny topic – it is not so simple as to say “attacking dams is a war crime” in all circumstances.
In any case, the legalities are not the main point here. The destruction of dams has the potential to impact civilians on a scale which is an order of magnitude higher than anything which has yet occured. The reality of the war in Ukraine is that, due to the fact that most of the fighting is occuring in depopulated areas (along with Russia’s use of precision standoff weapons) civilian casualties have been mercifully low. Through May of this year, there were fewer than 9,000 recorded civilian deaths in Ukraine (including both Ukrainian and Russian controlled territories). This is a thankfully low number, compared (for example) to the war in Syria, where over 30,000 civilians are killed annually, or Iraq, where nearly 18,000 civilians died per year in the years following the American invasion in 2003.
A breaking dam, however, massively escalates the threat to civilians. Tens of thousands of civilians are in the flood path and have to be evacuated – but perhaps even more significantly, the destruction of the dam creates a major threat to agriculture. There are also rising escalation risks, and the last thing anybody wants is for dams to become a permanent menu item.
In this article, I want to conduct a preliminary assessment of the destruction of the dam, its consequences, and its potential causes. In particular, I want to sort through the evidence and get a sense of whether Ukraine or Russia is a more likely culprit. As it currently stands, the situation is in flux and it is not as if we will find either Zelensky’s or Putin’s fingerprints on the detonator, but we can at least put some puzzle pieces roughly into position and get a sense of what the picture looks like.
One thing that I want to mention, first off, is that we do not need to assume that the dam was intentionally destroyed. For example, in a now infamous Washington Post article, we learn that Ukraine experimented with hitting the dam with GMLRS rockets in an attempt to blow a hole and create a controlled flood. The sense that one gets here is that Ukraine did not necessarily intend to destroy the dam altogether, but rather that they wanted to create a limited breach and by extension a limited flood.
We will keep such possibilities in mind and consider them to be a distinction without difference. It’s entirely possible that one party or the other attempted to create a limited breach and accidentally brought about a much larger dam failure, but from our perspective this isn’t particularly different from intentionally bringing the whole thing down.
With this little distinction in mind, let’s begin to sort through what we know about this whole dam thing.
Water World
What on earth is (or was) the Kakhovka dam and what was its relation to the larger geography of the surrounding steppe?
To begin with, let’s make a brief note about the Dnieper. In its natural state, the Dnieper is a deeply difficult and turbulent river, characterized by a series of essentially unnavigable rapids. In fact, the Dnieper’s fiesty nature is precisely why the city of Kiev is where it is. 1200 years ago, when enterprising traders came rowing down the Dnieper (trying to get to the Black Sea, and thence to Constantinople), they found that certain portions of the river were impassable, and it was necessary to “portage” their boats – which means dragging them out of the river and overland to get past the rapids.
Portaging a boat on the middle Dnieper in 800 AD was dangerous. While disembarked and laboriously dragging the boat downstream, a trading party would be highly vulnerable to attack by the various warlike tribes which inhabited the region at the time. So it became necessary to build some sort of outpost stronghold which could serve as a waypoint to make passage down the river at least acceptably safe. Hence, Kiev – buit originally as a timber fortified trading post to ease passage along the middle Dnieper.
This is perhaps interesting, but as an aside it illustrates the basic point that for most of human history the Dnieper was not a friendly or easily navigable river akin to the Mississippi or the Rhine, and in the Soviet era a major effort was undertaken at last to tame it, in the form of a series of hydroelectric dams. These dams stiffled the rapids, generated electricity, smoothed the river’s course, and created enormous resevoirs, of which the Kakhovka resevoir is the largest by volume.
The Resevoirs and Dams of the Dneiper
The creation of the Kakhovka resevoir was also vitally linked to a series of canals which are fed from the resevoir. The most important of these is the Crimean canal, which carries Dnieper water to Crimea, but there are also a series of irrigation works which are vital to agricutlure in Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts.
Canals fed by the Kakhovka Resevoir System
So that is the basic structure of the region’s hydrology. We can therefore enumerate both upstream and downstream effects from the dam’s breaching. Upstream effects relate to the draining of the Kakhovka resevoir, which will in time lead to insufficient flow through the canals, depriving both Crimea and regional farmland of water. Downstream effects are those of the enormous flooding which is currently taking place.
A threat to the Kakhovka dam first entered the discourse last autumn, when General Surovikin made the stunning decision to withdraw Russian forces from west bank Kherson – a decision which he said was prompted by the fear that Ukraine might destroy the dam and create a flood which would trap Russian troops on the far shore. That decision certainly looks prescient now, but thanks to this earlier discussion there was already a bevy of analysis conducted predicting what the flood path might look like.
Before and After
As per the latest information as of this writing, the river has not yet crested and water levels continue to rise, but this has already turned into a vast and extremely disruptive flood. This is a severe humanitarian and ecological disaster with implications for the military situation in Ukraine. The question is – who did it?
Incriminating Evidence
Let’s start by looking at the most direct evidence potentially implicating Russia or Ukraine. I’d like to start by looking at an allegedly damning (haha) video which has been circulating rapidly, which purports to confirm that Russia blew the dam.
The video in question allegedly shows a Russian soldier giving an interview in December in which he boasts that the Russin army mined the Kakhovka dam and plan to destroy it to create a cascading flood and wash away the Ukrainian troops downstream.
Not to be blunt, but this is an egregiously bad bit of trickery and it’s difficult to believe that people are falling for it. To begin with, this is an interview with a Ukrainian blogger and youtuber who goes by the screen name “Edgar Myrotvorets” – interestingly naming himself after the infamous Ukrainian kill list. The “Russian soldier” who he is interviewing is allegedly a gentleman named Yegor Guzenko. Yegor seems to be an interesting fellow – he pops up on social media periodically largely to confess to stereotyped Russian war crimes, like kidnapping civilians and executing Ukrainian prisoners, and of course blowing up dams.
Essentially, we are being asked to believe that there is a Russian soldier out there who is giving interviews to Ukrainian media in which he confesses to all of Russia’s nefarious activities, and then goes about his duties without being stopped or punished. It should be pretty obvious that Yegor is actually Yehor, and is not a Russian soldier at all but a Ukrainian impersonator – funnily enough, Yegor also has a beard even though the Russian MOD has been cracking down on facial hair.
In any case, Yegor’s explosive interview is the main piece of direct evidence which is being used to prove that Russia blew up the dam.
In contrast, the evidence implicating Ukraine is pretty straightforward: they openly talked about experimenting with ways to breach the dam, and have actively shot rockets and artillery shells at it in the past. We refer back to the infamous WaPo article, and in particular the key passage:
Kovalchuk [commander of Ukrainian Operative Commandment South] considered flooding the river. The Ukrainians, he said, even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages.
The test was a success, Kovalchuk said, but the step remained a last resort. He held off.
We even have footage of Ukraine striking the dam (particularly the roadway on top of it) from last year – footage which was incorrectly shared this week as being video of the strike that destroyed the dam on monday.
There is also a variety of circumstantial evidence worth sorting through.
A popular point being raised by the Ukrainian infosphere is the fact that the Kakhovka dam was under Russian control – therefore, they argue that only Russia could therefore have planted explosives to createa breach (at this point, we do not know the technical method used to create the breach).
I rather think that Russia’s control of the dam makes it much less likely that they are responsible, for the following basic reason. First, having control over the dam’s gates means that Russia had the power to manipulate water levels downstream at will. If they wanted to create flooding, they could have simply opened all the gates. With the dam now breached, they have lost this control.
The situation is very much akin to the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline (which now seems to be being blamed on Ukraine, rather predictibly). Both Nordstream and the Kakhovka dam were tools that Russia had the power to swing in one direction or the other. These were levers that Russia could move from on to off and back again. The destruction of these tools actually robs Russia of control, and in both cases we are asked to believe that Russia intentionally disabled its own levers.
Cui Bono?
Ultimately, any analysis would be incomplete without asking a very basic question: who benefits from the destruction of the dam? This is where it gets a bit complicated, largely because there are so many concerns at cross-currents to each other. Let’s enumerate a few.
First, the flooding disproportionately affects the Russian side of the river. This has been pretty thoroughly established. The eastern bank of the river is lower and thus more affected by flooding. We knew this in the academic sense, and now satellite imagery confirms that it is indeed the east bank that has suffered most of the flooding.
This has had the effect of washing out prepared Russian defenses, including minefields, and forcing withdrawls out of the flood zone, with plenty of imagery coming in of Russian soldiers standing in water up to their waists.
Secondly, the Upstream effects disroportionately affect Russia as well. Remember, the implications of the dam breach are not just downstream flooding, but also the draining of the resevoir, and this is particularly bad for Russia. First, in the long run this endangers the water flow through the Crimean Canal, which undermines a key Russian war aim. One of Russia’s primary motivations for launching this war in the first place was precisely to secure the Crimean Canal, which Ukraine had dammed up in order to choke off the peninsula’s water supply. Any analysis of the issue needs to aknowledge that, if you believe Russia blew the dam, you are essentially saying that they voluntarily trashed one of their primary war aims.
But it’s not just the Crimean Canal – there are also the variety of irrigation canal networks which sustain agriculture in east-bank Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts – oblasts which Russia has annexed and which are firmly under Russian control.
The only way to spin all this (and there are some people, like Peter Zeihan, trying to spin it this way) as being in Russian interests is to argue that Russia expects to lose control of all this territory (including Crimea) and is going scorched earth in anticipation of defeat. But to believe this, you need to believe that Russia is badly losing the war and is on the verge of total defeat, and if you believe this I have nothing to say to you except to direct you to this link.
Third, we need to note the effects that this will have on a potential amphibious operation. In the short term, this obviously turns the lower Dneiper into a dangerous morass, and as the water subsides it will leave plenty of mess and mud which will make a river crossing very difficult for several weeks. In the long run, however, crossing the river may actually be easier – and here is where I want to make what I think is a critical point.
As long as Russia had control of the Kakhovka dam, they had the power to create flooding downstream at will. The optimal time to do this would be while Ukraine was attempting an amphibious assault out of Kherson. If you created flooding during such an assault, you would be complicating the crossing and washing out Ukraine’s beachheads. Obviously, Russia has now lost the ability to do this.
We already know that Russia understands how and why to manipulate the water levels to its advantage. Earlier this year, they were actually keeping the Kakhovka resevoir levels extremely low, most likely to minimize the threat of Ukraine breaching the dam (as Surovikin was apparently quite worried about). However, in recent weeks they closed up the gates and filled the resevoir up to the top.
Kakhova Resevoir Levels
Why would they do this? It seems likely that Russia would want to retain water so that they could create a surge (not by destroying the dam, but by opening the gates up) to disrupt any Ukrainian attempt to cross the river. Again, the appeal of the dam for Russia is that it is a lever which can be throttled up and down as the situation calls for it. The breach of the dam, however, robs them of this tool.
This brings us to the corollary point, which is that the breach has two major benefits for Ukraine. Not only is it washing out Russian defenses and disproportionately disrupting the Russian side of the river, but Russia has now lost the ability to create a flood at the opportune moment later on.
If I had to make my guess about what happened to the dam, it would be as follows:
I believe Russia was retaining water to maintain the power to create flooding in the event of a Ukrainian amphibious assault across the lower Dnieper. Ukraine attempted to nullify this tool with a limited breach of the dam (of the sort which they rehearsed last December) but the dam failure cascaded beyond what they intended due to A) the resevoir being at extremely high levels, putting excessive stress on the strucure, and B) previous damage to the structure from prior Ukrainian shelling and rocketry attacks. Indeed, images of the dam seem to suggest that it failed in stages, with a single span leaking before the collapse metastasized.
I find the idea that Russia destroyed the dam to be very difficult to believe, for the following reasons (in recap):
- Flooding disproportionately affected the Russian side of the river and destroyed Russian positions.
- The loss of the dam does severe damage to core Russian interests, including Crimean water access and agriculture on the steppe.
- The dam, while intact, was a tool which Russia was using to manipulate the water level freely.
- Of the two beligerent parties, only Ukraine has openly shot at the dam and talked about breaching it.
We may learn, of course, that there was some accidental failure of some kind, potentially due to the water tug of war being waged between Russia and Ukraine as they try to balance the flow of the river. But in a wartime situation, when a major infrastructure object is destroyed, it is most rational to assume intentional destruction, and in this situation the costs to critical Russian infrastructure and the loss of a valuable tool for controlling the river make it extremely difficult to believe that Russia would blow up its own dam.
Ultimately, perhaps your judgement on the matter simply reflects your larger belief about who is winning the war. Breaching a dam is, after all, rather a desperation move – so maybe the question to ask is: who do you think is more desperate? Whose back is against the wall here – Russia, or Ukraine?
Turkiye’s Proposal For A Kakhovka Dam Investigation Committee Is A Genius Soft Power Move
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | JUNE 7, 2023
Turkish President Erdogan proposed the creation of a multilateral committee for investigating the Kakhovka Dam explosion during a call with President Putin on Wednesday. He suggested that it could comprise the two conflicting parties, the UN, and members of the international community such as his country, which has experience mediating between Moscow and Kiev during their grain deal talks. This was a genius soft power move that’ll powerfully shape global perceptions about this incident.
Russia and Ukraine blame one another for this terrorist attack, and while many might have predicted that the US would take its proxy’s side, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday that “we cannot say conclusively what happened at this point.” This stance is almost certainly attributable to the fact that Ukrainian Major General Andrey Kovalchuk boasted to the Washington Post in December about how Kiev tested blowing up the dam with US-supplied HIMARS missiles late last year.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova made sure that the entire world knew about this too by bringing it up during a press briefing the day after.
She rhetorically asked US officials “Were you aware of how American weapons, the weapons that are being supplied to Ukraine, are used? That trial tests of a terrorist attack against civilian infrastructure in third countries are being made? These are the questions that we directly pose in the public space before the White House; you must answer them.”
Considering that the US officially regards the dam’s destruction as a war crime, which its Alternative Representative to the UN for Special Political Affairs Robert Wood emphasized during Tuesday’s Security Council meeting about this, it has every reason to support the investigation that Turkiye just proposed. As for Kiev, it insists that Russia was to blame, so refusing to participate in a truly neutral multilateral investigation would come off as incredibly suspicious by suggesting that it has something to hide.
The US and Ukraine, which are the principal antagonists in the NATO-Russian proxy war, are therefore pressured to go along with this initiative from their mutual Turkish partner lest they risk stoking speculation that they’re afraid of a dark truth emerging. Neither can credibly imply that Ankara has any ulterior motives in proposing this investigation either since it’s a NATO ally that’s consistently voted against Russia at the UNGA and has even armed Kiev with drones for use against Moscow’s troops.
Therein lies the reason why President Erdogan’s proposal was such a genius soft power move since it puts those two in a dilemma. Going along with the investigation risks revealing incontrovertible evidence that Kiev blew up the Kakhovka Dam while declining to participate makes them look guilty in the court of public opinion. Regardless of whatever they choose to do, Turkiye comes off as responsible member of the international community, which boosts its global prestige and especially that of its multipolar leader.
Israel displaces more Palestinian families in occupied Jerusalem
MEMO | June 7, 2023
The Israeli occupation authorities demolished several Palestinian homes in occupied Jerusalem on Tuesday, displacing three extended families, Anadolu has reported.
Eyewitnesses told the news agency that Israeli police officers accompanied the team from the Jerusalem municipality that demolished the house owned by the Totah family in Wadi Al-Juz. The house was built 24 years ago. Yesterday’s demolition was the fourth for this family; three other homes were demolished in March because they didn’t have building licences. A stable near the house was also demolished.
Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation authorities forced the Burkan, Nassar and Al-Tawil families to demolish their own homes, which consisted of five apartments in Silwan’s Wadi Qaddoum. The families either had to demolish their homes or pay large fines to have the municipality do it. At least 30 people were rendered homeless by the demolitions, including children.
Earlier this week, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that the Israeli occupation authorities have demolished, forced local people to demolish or seized 290 Palestinian-owned structures across the West Bank and Jerusalem in the first quarter of 2023.
“All but 19 of the structures were targeted for lacking building permits, which are nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain,” explained OCHA. “As a result, 413 people, including 194 children, were displaced, and the livelihoods or access to services of over 11,000 others were affected.”
OCHA added that, “The number of structures targeted in the first quarter of 2023 has increased by 46 per cent compared with the same period in 2022, which already saw the highest number of demolitions recorded in the West Bank and Jerusalem since 2016.”
Ukraine blew up Kakhovka dam as revenge for failed offensive – Kremlin
RT | June 6, 2023
Ukrainian forces sabotaged the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam in Russia’s Kherson Region in a bid to deprive Crimea of drinking water and distract from its faltering counteroffensive, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed on Tuesday.
The dam was partially destroyed early on Tuesday morning, sending torrents of water downstream and flooding towns and villages along the path of the Dnieper River.
“We are talking about a deliberate sabotage by the Ukrainian side,” Peskov told reporters. “This sabotage could potentially lead to very serious consequences for several tens of thousands of inhabitants of the region, environmental consequences and consequences of a different nature, which have yet to be established.”
Peskov claimed that one of the key goals of the attack was to deprive Crimea of water. Crimea’s 2 million residents largely receive their water from the North Crimean Canal, which is fed from the reservoir above the Kakhovka dam.
“This sabotage is also connected with the fact that, having launched large-scale offensive operations two days ago, the Ukrainian armed forces are not achieving their goals,” Peskov continued. Russia’s Defense Ministry has said it repelled several large-scale attacks in the southern sector of the front in recent days. These “offensive actions are choking,” Peskov stated.
Ukrainian officials and their European backers have accused Russia of blowing up the dam, with European Council President Charles Michel calling the attack “a war crime.” Moscow “strongly rejects” the accusation, Peskov said.
While the flooding now makes it difficult for Ukrainian forces to cross the Dnieper and attack Russia’s defensive lines, the destruction of the dam also appears to aid a number of Ukraine’s key objectives. The flooding mostly threatens the eastern bank of the river, where Russian troops withdrew to last year amid concerns that the Ukrainian military would blow up the dam.
With the dam destroyed, the level of the Dnieper has fallen further upstream, including at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant. Ukrainian troops made several attempts to cross the river to recapture the plant from Russian forces last year, and lowering the water level would remove a major obstacle to future attempts. Additionally, the Soviet-era plant depends on water from the Dnieper to cool its reactors and its spent fuel rods.
The Ukrainian military conducted a test strike on the dam using an American-supplied HIMARS launcher last year, Ukrainian General Andrey Kovalchuk told the Washington Post in December.
Two months earlier, Russia’s envoy to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, warned the UN Security Council that Kiev’s forces were considering a “reckless” attack on the dam with sea mines or missiles. “The authorities in Kiev and their Western backers will bear full responsibility for all the consequences of such a devastating scenario,” Nebenzia cautioned.
Don’t Forget WaPo’s Report From December About Kiev’s Plans To Blow Up The Kakhovka Dam
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | JUNE 6, 2023
The partial destruction of the Kakhovka Dam on early Tuesday morning saw Kiev and Moscow exchange accusations about who’s to blame, but a report from the Washington Post (WaPo) in late December extends credence to the Kremlin’s version of events. Titled “Inside the Ukrainian counteroffensive that shocked Putin and reshaped the war”, its journalists quoted former commander of November’s Kherson Counteroffensive Major General Andrey Kovalchuk who shockingly admitted to planning this war crime:
“Kovalchuk considered flooding the river. The Ukrainians, he said, even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages. The test was a success, Kovalchuk said, but the step remained a last resort. He held off.”
His remark about how “the step remained a last resort” is pertinent to recall at present considering that the first phase of Kiev’s NATO–backed counteroffensive completely failed on Monday according to the Russian Ministry of Defense. Just like Ukraine launched its proxy invasion of Russia in late May to distract from its loss in the Battle of Artyomovsk, so too it seems it might have gone through with Kovalchuk’s planned war crime to distract from this most recent embarrassment as well.
The above-mentioned explanation isn’t as far-fetched as some might initially think either. After all, one of complexity theory’s precepts is that initial conditions at the onset of non-linear processes can disproportionately shape the outcome. In this context, the first failed phase of Kiev’s counteroffensive risked ruining the entire campaign, which could have prompted its planners to employ Kovalchuk’s “last resort” in order to introduce an unexpected variable into the equation that might improve their odds.
Russia had over 15 months to entrench itself in Ukraine’s former eastern and southern regions that Kiev still claims as its own through the construction of various defensive structures and associated contingency planning so as to maintain its control over those territories. It therefore follows that even the most properly supplied and thought-out counteroffensive wasn’t going to be a walk in the park contrary to the Western public’s expectations, thus explaining why the first phase just failed.
This reality check shattered whatever wishful thinking expectations Kiev might have had since it showed that the original plan of swarming the Line of Contact (LOC) entails considerable costs that reduce the chances of it succeeding unless something serious happens behind the front lines to distract the Russian defenders. Therein lies the strategic reason behind partially destroying the Kakhovka Dam on Tuesday morning exactly as Kovalchuk proved late last year is possible to pull off per his own admission to WaPo.
The first of Kiev’s goals that this terrorist attack served was to prompt global concern about the safety of the Russian-controlled Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which relies on water from the now-rapidly-depleting Kakhovka Reservoir for cooling. The International Atomic Energy Agency said that there’s “no immediate nuclear safety risk”, but a latent one can’t be ruled out. Should a crisis transpire, then it could throw Russia’s defenses in northern Zaporozhye Region into chaos.
The second goal is that the downstream areas of Kherson Region, which are divided between Kiev and Moscow, have now been flooded. Although the water might eventually recede after some time, this could complicate Russia’s defensive plans along the left bank of the Dnieper River. Taken together with the consequences connected to the first scenario, this means that a significant part of the riparian front behind the LOC could soon soften up to facilitate the next phase of Kiev’s counteroffensive.
In fact, the geographic scope of Kiev’s “unconventional softening operation” might even expand to Crimea due to the threat that Tuesday morning’s terrorist attack could pose to the peninsula’s water supply via its eponymous canal. The regional governor said that sufficient supplies remain for now but that the coming days will reveal the level of risk. While Crimea still managed to survive Kiev’s blockade of the canal for eight years, there’s no doubt that this development is disadvantageous for Russia.
The fourth strategic goal builds upon the three that were already discussed and concerns the psychological warfare component of this attack. On the foreign front, Kiev’s gaslighting that Moscow is guilty of “ecocide” was amplified by the Mainstream Media in spite of Kovalchuk’s damning admission to WaPo last December in order to maximize global pressure on Russia, while the domestic front is aimed at sowing panic in Ukraine’s former regions with the intent of further softening Russia’s defenses there.
And finally, the last strategic goal that was served by partially destroying the Kakhovka Dam is that Russia might soon be thrown into a dilemma. Kiev’s “unconventional softening operation” along the Kherson-Zaporozhye LOC could divide the Kremlin’s focus from the Belgorod-Kharkov and Donbass fronts, which could weaken one of those three and thus risk a breakthrough. The defensive situation could become even more difficult for Russia if Kiev expands the conflict by attacking Belarus and/or Moldova too.
To be absolutely clear, the military-strategic dynamics of the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine still favor Russia for the time being, though that’s precisely why Kiev carried out Tuesday morning’s terrorist attack in a desperate attempt to reshape them in its favor. This assessment is based on the observation that Russia’s victory in the Battle of Artyomovsk shows that it’s able to hold its own against NATO in the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” that the bloc’s chief declared in mid-February.
Furthermore, even the New York Times admitted that the West’s sanctions failed to collapse Russia’s economy and isolate it, while some of its top influencers also admitted that it’s impossible to deny the proliferation of multipolar processes in the 15 months since the special operation began. These include German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, former US National Security Council member Fiona Hill, and Goldman Sachs’ President of Global Affairs Jared Cohen.
The military-strategic dynamics described in the preceding two paragraphs will inevitably doom the West to defeat in the New Cold War’s largest proxy conflict thus far unless something major unexpectedly happens to change them, which is exactly what Kiev was trying to achieve via its latest terrorist attack. The reason why few foresaw this is because Kovalchuk admitted to WaPo last December that his side had previously planned to blow up part of the Kakhovka Dam as part of its Kherson Counteroffensive.
It therefore seemed unthinkable that Kiev would ultimately do just that over half a year later and then gaslight that Moscow was to blame when the Mainstream Media itself earlier reported the existence of Ukraine’s terrorist plans after quoting the same Major General who bragged about them at the time. Awareness of this fact doesn’t change what happened, but it can have a powerful impact on the Western public’s perceptions of this conflict, which is why WaPo’s report should be brought to their attention.
The UK’s “Chilling” Secret Unit That Monitored Lockdown Dissent
More revelations about the secretive Counter Disinformation Unit
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | June 3, 2023
A clandestine UK Government unit dubbed the Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) has been implicated in a troubling endeavor to curb and control online discussions about the controversial Covid-19 lockdown policies. The covert operation allegedly involved the collaboration of social media companies in a strategic bid to quell supposed domestic “threats.”
According to revelations from Freedom of Information requests and data protection requests from The Telegraph, posts critical of Covid-19 restrictions, including those questioning mass vaccination of children, were systematically removed.
Social media companies are now under scrutiny following allegations that their technologies were deployed to thwart the wide circulation or promotion of posts tagged as potentially problematic by the CDU or its Cabinet Office equivalent.
The files revealed the surreptitious monitoring of critics of the Government’s Covid plans. Artificial intelligence firms were reportedly enlisted by the government to search social media platforms, flagging any discussions opposing vaccine passports.
In a startling revelation, the BBC was implicated in clandestine government policy discussions regarding this alleged misinformation.
The CDU, hosted by the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS), operated a “trusted flagger” system with major social media companies. This mechanism expedited requests for content removal. The CDU, still operational, was formed in 2019, initially focusing on the European elections, later shifting its attention to the pandemic.
Critics, including MPs and freedom of speech campaigners, have labeled the revelations as “truly chilling” and a strategy tantamount to “censoring British citizens” — a tactic likened to those of the Chinese Communist Party.
“Any attempt by governments to shut down legitimate debate is hugely concerning, but to discover that DCMS actively sought to censor the views of those who were speaking up for children’s welfare is truly chilling,” said Miriam Cates, a Conservative MP to The Telegraph.
A government spokesman refuted the allegations, stating that the unit was designed to track narratives and trends using publicly available information to safeguard public health and national security. The spokesman insisted that the unit never monitored individuals and had a strict policy against referring journalists and MPs to social media platforms.
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Jewish Guilt is the Discourse of The Goyim
By Gilad Atzmon | April 24, 2018
For quite some time the British have accepted that British Jewish organizations have hijacked the political discourse. As has happened in other Western countries, the British political establishment has engaged is a relentless rant against antisemitsm. Sometime the focus drifts for a day or two. An alleged ‘Russian nerve gas attack’ provided a 48 hour pause. Occasionally we bomb Arabs in the name of ‘human intervention’ only to realize a day or two later that we have, once again, followed a premeditated foreign agenda. But, somehow, we always return to the antisemitism debate, as if our media and politicians are a herd of flies gravitating to a pile of poop. … continue
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