In February 2022, Russia blockaded Ukraine’s Black Sea ports through which all Ukrainian bulk exports were being shipped, part of an ongoing attempt to wage war on global food security in the context of its invasion of Ukraine. In addition, the ports, through which mostly grain is exported, were mined. The Atlantic Council estimated then that globally about 47 million people were threatened with starvation due to these actions.

The likelihood of a hunger catastrophe has now stratospherically increased because of what happened in the early morning hours of June 6th, 2023, concurrent with the start of a Ukrainian offensive to push back against the Russian invaders: the Nova Kakhovka dam at the river Dnipro and connected power stations were exploded, leading to a flood of biblical proportions. For the last 15 months Russia have been killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying civil infra-structure. At the time of the explosion, which could have only worked fron the inside of the physical structure, it was in control of the dam. Destroying it brings only advantages to the Russians, not the Ukrainians – either to block a Ukrainian offensive or to cover up a retreat, or progress to a strategy of scorched earth. The desire to wipe Ukraine off the map, whether by occupation or destruction, has been expressed often enough. Locals reported an unusual accumulation of Russian troops directly adjacent to the dam and the power station the night before.

It is a war crime, and one of epic proportions. Tens of thousands of people are threatened right now and need to be evacuated, with longterm damage to their towns and villages, some irreparably ruined, and no clean water for years to come. It is not just the flooding, and the flooding with water that contains poisonous chemicals (they expect up to 400 tons of engine oil from the plant alone are mixed in the floods), there are also mines carried by the floods that now dot the landscape.

It would already be a disaster of major proportions in peace times. Ukrainian forces and international rescue organizations are, as I write this, evacuating people in the affected region under ongoing Russian shelling. Some 80 villages with almost 1000 houses are already submerged. Further South, the grain basket of Ukraine will not only be flooded – watering systems will be destroyed that leave the land parched for decades to come, making agriculture impossible. Almost half a million people will potentially lack water that is safe to drink in addition to the effects on their livelihood, agriculture.

About 150 km upriver is the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which relies on cooling water from the now emptying reservoir. So far the IAEA says there is no immediate concern for a melt down, but the danger has to be assessed on an ongoing basis.

As so often, some small details captured my attention that really made the tears flow. It was not the mention of all of the animals (but the swans and ducks) drowning in the Kherson city zoo. Rather one environmental report stated that it is the worst time for animals in the wild to have been exposed: countless spring-born rabbits, foxes, fawns were too young to escape the flood wave of 11.5 feet (3.5. meters) and ground nesting bird nests were destroyed by the water. It is truly apocalyptic, comparable to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Maybe it is because you can imagine a drowning fawn and the compactness of that moment of death for a whole region, literally thousands of fawns, while your mind refuses to wrap itself around starving children across the continents, little by little dying from hunger. Refugee waves from hunger zones that will be accosted and returned at the borders if their faces are not white enough. A small country, Ukraine, that lost a high percentage of the generations actively involved in military defense. A country that will be flooded by maimed soldiers for decades to come. The trauma of Ukrainian children who have been growing up under constant threat of death all around them not just the battle fields.

There is historical precedent. In 1941 the Red Army exploded the Zaporizhzhia dam to stop the advance of Hitler’s army. At the time a wave several meters high descended on the Dnipro valley, killing 10.000s of people, some say over 100.000, even though the Zaporizhzhia lake contained far less water than the Kakhovka reservoir today (it had more than the Salt Lake in Utah.) The disregard for life, human or otherwise, from flooding or starving a people into submission, like Stalin did with the Holodomor, a man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, is just incomprehensible. Let us not forget, though, that the U.S. is no stranger to those actions. According to the Times of Israel, on March 6, 2017, a covert United States military unit reportedly targeted a massive dam (Tabqa Dam) in Syria controlled by the Islamic State with some of the largest conventional bombs in the army’s arsenal, despite the levee being on a “no-strike list” given that flooding could put the lives of tens of thousands at risk. Apparently a catastrophe was avoided because some of the bombs did not explode.

Looks like similar luck did not extend to the Crimea and the poor people of the region and city of Kherson.

Music today: The Ukrainian anthem is called ‘Ukraine is Not Yet Dead’, composed in 1863 by Mykhailo Verbytsky to a patriotic poem by ethnographer Pavlo Chubynsky. It was the short-lived anthem of the Ukrainian National Republic in 1917 and restored as such after the restoration of independence in 1992.

I VERY much recommend listening to Yale Professor Timothy Snyder’s lecture series the Making of Modern Ukraine which is an analysis that puts the daily horrors events of this war in a historical context.