Forms of evil all so dark that it’s hard to distinguish a shade

In a Ukraine update from ten days ago (yes, I’ll get to what happened yesterday), Kos of Daily Kos discussed Russia’s two fiercest critics of the war who are also two of its worst people. One isYevgeny Progozhin, head of the bloody attack on Bakhmut. The other is Igor Girkin, leader of the fake “rebellion” that launched the Russian invasion of Donbas. He’s also indicted in The Hague for downing Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, killing 298. The two are now feuding. About them Kos wrote:

It’s unfathomable that they both have survived as long as they have given the fierceness of their criticisms, but they have two advantages. First, they approach their criticism from the nationalist right—Russia isn’t brutal enough, not aggressive enough, doesn’t kill enough. Criticism from the pacifist left is instant jail. The other is they never criticize Russian dictator Vladimir Putin himself. Everyone else can be at fault, but the buck never stops with the Big Guy.

In a post from about a week ago Kos described what has to happen when Ukraine attacks defended and dug in Russian positions. I’ll let you read how difficult that may be In a post almost from a week ago Mark Sumner of Kos wrote that before the war Bakhmut, along with Soledar to the north, made most of its money through its salt mines. Now that Russia has taken over the city those mines are a good place for Russia to store munitions. That’s certainly better than in above ground depots that Ukraine is very good at shelling.

So Russia finally has a safe spot to keep their valuables. Except they don’t. Because while the mines may be extensive, the number of entrances is very limited. A few precision-guided weapons directed at locations like, say, 48.602302N, 38.036391E would mean that all the supplies Russia packed into those tunnels would become inaccessible. Those supplies would also stay nice, dry, and ready until Ukraine moved into the area and cleared those entrances.

Tim Mak used to work for NPR and is now a freelance journalist in Ukraine, sometimes posting on Kos. Mak told the story of Oleksandr Selyverstov, an engineer at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant when Russia took it over. Selyverstov was able to escape what became horrible working conditions. He now works at the Chernobyl Museum in Kyiv. He calls it the scariest museum he’s ever been to.

And there’s a new exhibit there, on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Oleksandr paused to look at a photo of the reactor where he once worked. He said 99.9 percent of the preconditions for a nuclear disaster were present at the Zaporizhzhia plant, that safety precautions had become lax, and that with some small miscalculation or mistake, untold numbers of people could suffer – his biggest fear.

The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant sits beside a good size reservoir created by a dam across the Dnipro River. The plant uses reservoir water to cool the reactor. Sumner reported that dam has been breached, flooding downriver villages and the city of Kherson. The reservoir is draining, though it seems for now the power plant won’t face difficulties. But, beyond the concerns of the plant, the dam breach has huge consequences. There’s flooding, loss of drinking water (including to Crimea), destruction of natural habitat, loss of water for Ukraine’s vitally important grain exports, loss of electricity generated at the dam, loss of bridges and other infrastructure, loss of all the animals in the Kazkova Dibrova Zoo (in Kherson? near the dam?) because Russia didn’t care to evacuate them, exposure of mines planted in the water, and much more. The damage will be enormous. Many of these effects will last years. As to why the dam failed, Sumner wrote that Russia has controlled the dam for almost a year. All the hydropower and sluicegate controls are on the Russian side. A big contributor to the failure is Russia’s mismanagement of the dam, first letting the water level get too low, then keeping it too high. By June 1 water was sloshing over the dam and damaging the roadway there. By June 3 a section of the roadway was gone. By June 6 the disaster was underway. Because the road was gone there was no way for Ukraine to access dam controls. Only Russia could do things like open the sluice gates to reduce the water level and perhaps protect the dam. So the dam failed because of mismanagement and neglect? Sumner wrote:

However, other footage seems to indicate that an explosion did occur—a conclusion supported by those text messages from locals and other reports of a loud explosion at just the time of the dam failure. Ukrainian officials are criticizing media for downplaying the damage and failing to definitively pin the explosion on Russia. There are reports of the explosion at the dam being heard 80 km away, which would not be the case in even the most catastrophic collapse. Kakhovka Dam was deliberately destroyed by an explosion that targeted the power plant and control structures, as well as breaking the structural integrity of the dam. That explosion is what locals in the area reported at 1:20 in the morning. The incomprehensible noise that came after has only gotten worse as the breach in the dam has continued to widen and water has poured down into the lower Dnipro basin. The deliberate destruction of a dam in order to flood civilian areas is a war crime—another to add to the thick stack of such crimes Russia has accumulated over the course of its illegal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. It’s hard to say if it’s worse than the destruction of Mariupol, or the mass graves at Bucha and Izyum, or the torture chambers found in basements across formerly Russian-occupied regions, or the deliberate bombing of hospitals and shelters. Such forms of evil are all so dark that it’s hard to distinguish a shade.