Chris Baraniuk writes:

A push notification news alert on his phone, then images of the deluge—that’s how Heorhiy Veremiychyk learned of the disaster. With water pouring through the stricken Kakhovka Dam in the Kherson region of Ukraine, he immediately understood the enormity of what had happened. “The water raised very sharply,” he says, referring to the terrible effects on wildlife downstream. “There was no possibility to escape.”

Veremiychyk, of the National Ecological Center of Ukraine (NECU), says the impact of the dam’s destruction is severe. It will range from the obliteration of habitats to the contamination of drinking water. He can only watch from afar. Like millions of Ukrainians, he fled the Russian invaders, and he has been watching the Kakhovka Dam crisis unfold from the Czech Republic.

President Zelensky has called the catastrophe an ecocide—apparently in reference to Article 441 of Ukraine’s criminal code, which defines it as the mass destruction of flora or fauna, poisoning of the atmosphere or water, or other large-scale environmental crimes.

Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister, Andrij Melnyk, says the dam’s destruction is “the worst environmental disaster in Europe since Chernobyl.” And various research and conservation groups are now tallying the dreadful toll on the surrounding environment. This is just the latest in a long series of ecologically damaging acts that have occurred since Russia invaded. For many months, experts have been sounding the alarm about the environmental aspect of the war.

Every crime has a perpetrator and, for many Ukrainians and expert observers, that perpetrator is obvious. In an email to WIRED, the head of NECU, Ruslan Havryliuk, calls this “another Russian military terrorist act against Ukraine.” Russia has denied responsibility, but it is important to note that certain Russian statements about the country’s activities in Ukraine have been unreliable.

“Russia is illegally invading and occupying Ukraine, therefore Russia is to blame for this—there’s no point in even having that discussion, in my eyes,” says Jonathon Turnbull, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford who has studied the ecological impacts of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The dam’s destruction is not a scorched-earth tactic, he argues—but a “drowned earth” tactic. [Continue reading…]