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Fish swept up and dumped by flood waters drive home Ukraine’s claims of Russian “ecocide” while Russian gunners attacked rescuers amid the chaos of the Nova Khakovka dam burst.
Apparently caught unawares, the Kremlin’s own troops were washed away, their trenches flooded, accommodation inundated and, as they ran into the open to save themselves, Ukrainian forces rained death down upon them from the opposite bank of the Dnipro River.
At first glance this looks like an own goal, or two, by Russia. It controlled the dam that burst, is accused by many Western nations of actually blowing it up, and it engulfed its own troops plus Ukrainian civilians under its occupation.
But Moscow has form for sacrificing the lives of many for the motherland, in the same way, on the same river.
As Nazi troops advanced against the Russian army in 1941 across Ukraine, Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, were given an order of terrible ruthlessness.
They were to blow up the Zaporizhzhia hydroelectric dam that bisected the eponymous industrial city, which stands 200 kilometers (125 miles) upriver from today’s Nova Kakhovka barricade).
On August 18, Stalin’s henchmen carried out his order. The breach in the dam sent a surge of water downstream that killed Soviet soldiers and thousands of civilians. No official history of the atrocity was recorded and historians differ over the death toll sitting somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 souls.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has again blamed Moscow for the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam and said Russia should bear “criminal liability” for “ecocide.”
In an interview with national media on Tuesday, Zelensky said: “In our opinion, this is a crime, the Prosecutor General’s Office has already registered it. It will have evidence. There is a modern classification – ecocide,” he said, adding: “I think that there should be criminal liability… International institutions, including the International Criminal Court, should react.”
Both Kyiv and Moscow accuse each other of being behind the major breach of the dam, although it is unclear whether the dam was deliberately attacked, or whether the collapse was the result of structural failure.
Zelensky referred to a report by Ukrainian intelligence last year that claimed occupying Russian troops had mined the dam.
“The consequences of the tragedy will be clear in a week.
