After the dam blast: how Russia and Ukraine use water as a weapon Nord Stream attack: US was made aware of Ukrainian sabotage plans in June 2022

You don’t just blow up a dam. These concrete behemoths are designed to hold back billions of gallons of water. They must not collapse or even fail under very high pressure, because the consequences would be disastrous. What happens when the bodies of water are forcibly released can be seen at the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine.

Ukraine blames Russia for the blast, Russia claims Ukraine fired a missile at the dam. The dam is located in the Russian-occupied territory in the Ukrainian region of Kherson. It is not yet clear which of the two versions is the correct one.

According to Ukraine, up to 80 cities could be affected by flooding, Russia estimates that more than 20,000 people are threatened by the floods. In addition, the water from the reservoir is used to cool the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant, and the North Crimean Canal branches from it – one of the most complex irrigation systems in the world, providing water supply to 85 percent of the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula .

Russia blocked the sea route across the Black Sea

The Russian offensive war in Ukraine is being waged in the air, with drones and missiles, and on the ground, with tanks and artillery, with ground troops in trenches. The attack on the dam – regardless of who is ultimately responsible for it – shows once again how important water is in this war. Especially in the first weeks there was also fighting on the water, namely in the Black Sea, when Russia tried to take the south of the country and its port cities of Odessa and Mykolaiv from here. The Ukrainian army succeeded in sinking the Russian warship Moskva. The attack on the port cities ultimately failed, since then there has been hardly any fighting on the water, but there has been fierce for and with it. It is about infrastructure, about strategic advantages in the field, about the energy and drinking water supply of the country.

Although Russia was unable to take Odessa, the naval fleet managed to block the sea route from Ukraine’s main port. As a result, Ukraine could not export millions of tons of grain – world market prices rose, harvests threatened to rot in silos, some parts of the world threatened famine. It was not until months later that a grain deal largely resolved the blockade.

Russia tried to flood Kiev

Together with the Black Sea, the Dnipro River is the country’s most important body of water. It comes from Russia, flows through Belarus and then Ukraine from north to south, where it flows into the Black Sea. The river divides the country into two fairly equal halves. At the start of the war, experts speculated that one of Russia’s possible goals might be to bring the eastern half to the banks of the Dnipro.

It is possible that one of the greatest catastrophes of this war was averted in the early days on this river. On February 26, 2022, the Russian army fired a missile at the dam of the Kiev reservoir. Ukraine intercepted the missile lest the capital south of it be threatened with a catastrophic flood – much greater than what is now feared in the Kherson region.

In the spring of 2022, when Russia failed to advance into southern Ukraine and was pushed back to the outskirts of Mykolaiv, they destroyed a pipeline in the occupied Kherson region that was carrying more than 120,000 cubic meters of water to the city every day . The consequences were devastating: in the summer people queued for hours in the sun to fill the drinking water cans at the tap points. In the winter, they had to think about how to protect their water against frost, because heating and electricity went out in large parts of the region – partly because the energy is generated by hydroelectric power plants.

The Ukraine also uses the power of the water for itself

But the Ukrainian defenders also know how to use the element of water for themselves. When Russia started the war and tried to take the capital Kiev as quickly as possible, they blew up a small dam in the Irpin River. They flooded a village and stopped the Russian tank columns on their way to Kiev. The army has blown up several hundred bridges domestically to cut off supply lines to Russia. A destroyed bridge in Irpin finally halted the storming of Kiev, and its images became some of the most iconic images of the entire war.

The price of this self-destruction is high. As a result, Ukrainians lose their homes, their own supply routes are also affected and the costs of reconstruction are enormous. It will take a long time, partly because Ukraine has so far obtained almost all its steel for bridges from the Mariupol steel plant – which has been destroyed and is under Russian occupation. But there is one danger greater than the water from a Ukrainian point of view: Russian attackers.

This article was first published on Zeit Online. Watson may have changed the headings and subheadings. Here’s the original.