Dear Editor,
Early in the 1981 action-adventure film “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark”, the character Nazi Major Toht references archaeologist Jones by saying, “The man is nefarious.” That’s exactly what I would say to describe Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Both Toht and Putin are masters of projection.
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was met with considerable and unexpected resistance and counter-offense, reports emerged in October that Russians, who had taken and were occupying the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River, had mined and were preparing to blow it up to prevent the Ukrainian army from advancing further. However, as the Ukrainian counteroffensive was expanding frontlines in other territories, the Russians necessarily refocused their defenses.
The dam was part of a 1956 hydroelectric power plant construction that created the Kakhovka Reservoir. The 150-mile-long reservoir, the largest in Europe, holds a volume of water equivalent to Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Not only is it a source of drinking water for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, but the resulting canal systems provide a source of irrigation throughout vast farmlands. And of equal importance, it has been an available water source that cools Europe’s largest nuclear power plant’s six reactors.
On June 6, the wall of the Kakhovka Dam collapsed triggering floods, threatening drinking water supplies, and endangering farmlands, ecosystems, and biodiversity due to the power plant’s industrial chemicals and lubricants washing into the water and soil. The flooding is forcing thousands of Ukrainians to evacuate. It’s a humanitarian crisis with far-reaching biological contamination consequences.
The Ukrainian foreign minister has accused Russia of “ecocide”. Although the exact cause of the dam’s collapse has yet to be determined, it does coincide with the Ukrainian army’s opening phase of a new counter-offensive. Their advance into the Russian-occupied Kherson region is now made more difficult since the transport of military equipment across the Dnipro River has been compromised. Nevertheless, I expect that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would say, as did Rear Admiral David Farragut, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”
Peter Wibell, Rutledge