Article Spotlights on Ukraine: Ecocide, the Kakhovka Dam Terrorist Attack, and the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant
Here are two highly recommended articles relating to key events in Russian’s war of aggression against Ukraine.While the news coverage has focused on the Prigozhin drama, far less attention has been given to the potential nuclear catastrophe at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which Ukrainian intelligence sources state has been mined by Russian soldiers. Not unrelated to this potential catastrophe is Russia’s destruction of the Kakhova dam, which was also mined by Russian soldiers and the danger of such an attack was announced by Zelensky in October 2022; yet, the warning was largely ignored by the international community and a strong Western response to Ukraine’s most devastating human-made environmental catastrophe since Chernobyl has yet to emerge.
“Nuclear Anxiety of the Wild Fields: On the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant” by Sasha Dovzhyk
The wild fields have been mined by the invaders. The nuclear specialists are terrified, tortured, or driven out of occupied Enerhodar by the Russian army. And the once orderly and dull nuclear power plant has become the site of an unprecedented military occupation of a civilian nuclear infrastructure site and the backdrop against which nightmares play out—and no longer just my own.
As I write this text, Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, tells the New Statesman that the plan to commit an act of terrorism on the Zaporizhzhia NPP is already finalized and approved, and the people who will carry it out are just waiting for their orders. As I write this text, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko is promising that the level of background radiation will go down by about eighty percent within 24 hours after any attack. It seems I have been writing this text my whole life. [. . .]
We, those who understand that the Russians have come to our land to kill all living things, bear the responsibility for making sure that this is understood from London to Canberra. For making Western European intellectuals feel the hopelessness that draws them out of their contemplation of the horror and unties their hands. The catastrophe is ongoing. That means that we have a lot of work to do.
“The Bombing of Ukraine’s Kakhovka Dam Affects All of Us” by Suriya Jayanti
Sixteen months into what has become a drawn out slog of numbing trench warfare in Ukraine’s east, many people around the world have dulled to the daily missile and drone counts out of Kyiv and reports of muted counteroffensives. It is almost impossible for a human in the modern world to maintain attention for this long. But in a war that has seen several escalations worthy of global attention—the Bucha massacre, the bombing of a Mariupol maternity hospital, the Azovstal Steel Works siege, the sabotage of Nord Stream, the abduction of Ukrainian children, to name a few—the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam is a shocking development. You should care.
The environmental and humanitarian consequences are already catastrophic. Tens of thousands of people have lost their homes. Thousands are stranded in 12 foot-deep flood zones. Millions have no potable water—Kherson, Mykolaiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhya oblasts relied on the dam and its reservoir for water, as did Crimea. At least 150 metric tons of oil and countless volumes of chemicals have leaked out into the Dnieper River en route to the Black Sea. More will join it from flooded gas stations, factories, and sewage facilities. Pictures of dead Ukrainian fish piled by the millions are already viral. There is so much more. . . .