In today’s edition, we are looking at the most recent eco-catastrophe in Nova Kakhovka

Nova Kakhovka: war 2.0

The flooding affecting the more than 16,000 people living along the right bank of the Dniepr for hours now takes on the features of a devious tidal wave, a suffocating stranglehold capable of strangling innocent lives without making a sound. A mirror of the Kremlin’s plans: to submerge Ukraine and its history, its people and, if need be, even its land.

It is legitimate in these hours to hazard hypotheses, knowing that it will probably take weeks to have some more clarity.

In the true sense of the word, a criminal move is expressly forbidden by the Geneva Convention, which is against the destruction of a dam when it ‘may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent serious losses among the civilian population’. Water as a weapon of mass destruction: likely new Putin ‘feat’.

Ukraine has already identified the members of the 205th motorised rifle brigade of the Russian Armed Forces, who allegedly stayed at the hydroelectric power station, as responsible for the sabotage. It may be too early for such a precise diagnosis. But with greater certainty, the Kremlin’s version can be branded as fake, with spokesman Peskov intent on impressing the incident as a “deliberate act of sabotage on the Ukrainian side aimed at depriving the Crimea of water” and aimed at distracting from the “stuttering Ukrainian offensive”. The same one that Moscow claims to have already curbed.

Two other scenarios are more likely. The first involves the Russians taking a cue from their military history textbooks, deploying the oft-employed tactic known as ‘scorched earth’, leaving the apocalypse behind to make the enemy’s advance more costly and complicated. In this sense, it is possible that the Kremlin decided to direct the Ukrainian attack eastwards rather than southwards, where the Kyiv offensive was indicated to be concentrated. This option is preparatory to the attempt to sever the land link that Moscow has established from Zaporizhzhia to Kherson, as far as Crimea, a crucial belt for Russian logistics. And to limit the range in which it can concentrate its unmotivated troops.

Ukraine will now have to study the ‘new’ maps and explore possible alternatives to the initial plans, coming to terms with a not marginal change of scenery, even with kilometres and kilometres of roads suddenly becoming impassable swamps.

The other hypothesis is that of an ‘accident’. Plausible in theory but unlikely in practice. Satellite images would indicate cracks in the dam already in the days before the collapse. But the structural failure would, in any case, result from Russia’s lack of maintenance, without forgetting that Ukrainian dams have long been in Moscow’s sights. In the long run, history hardly deceives. Finally, consider what is filtering in these minutes from the United States. Washington would be ready to share intelligence documents that could prove Russian responsibility for the events in Nova Kakhovka. That is, in the ‘new phase’ of the war – in the words of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz – which began with a catastrophe bearing Vladimir Putin’s signature.

One thing is to be hoped: that of the swan of the Kremlin, this is finally just the singing.