Ukraine Dam Loss Threatens 43,000 People
Kakhovka Dam Explosion is Mass Murder and a Crime Against Humanity
The question of how low Russia can go hasn’t been answered yet because each attack—on food, on the electrical grid, on hospitals, on residential complexes, on nuclear plants, and now on a dam—drags the bar lower. The UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) reports that Russia has committed :
… a wide range of human rights violations affecting both civilians and combatants. [The Office has] verified numerous allegations of arbitrary deprivation of life, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance, torture and ill-treatment, and conflict-related sexual violence.
That’s before we get to the thousands of kidnapped children who have wound up in Russia, to be raised as Russians.
It took the UN two days to come up with an estimate about how many people may die of the massive flooding that followed the bombing of the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipier River, which separated Russian- and Ukrainian-held areas. The dam held a major hydroelectric plant, and the levee that held back the waters was topped with the Antonovskiy Bridge, across which Ukraine was likely to have moved troops and materiel in its counteroffensive against Russian troops.
Though this story is still developing, we suggest the following story is the best we’ve seen so far. The article’s before-and-after images are excellent—and reminiscent of the flood destruction images from the Japanese Fukushima tsunami and the destruction of the Andaman quake and tsunami that destroyed wide swaths of Sumatra.
Updates to come.