Michael Weiss and James Rushton write:

It has been nine days since the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and hydroelectric facility caused the worst ecological disaster in Ukraine’s history since Chernobyl. Because Ukraine is a nation that has been at war for almost a year and a half, the flooding of more than 80 settlements in the Kherson region, resulting in the death of at least 10 people, with another 42 still missing, has already slipped from international headlines. The news is now dominated by former President Donald Trump’s arraignment in Miami on three dozen federal criminal counts and the start of Ukraine’s much-anticipated counteroffensive.

A host of European leaders quickly dismissed the possibility this was an accident, charging it was instead an act of terrorism or “ecocide,” as the Ukrainian government labeled it.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz described the dam’s collapse as “a new dimension in Russia’s war against Ukraine.” French President Emmanuel Macron called it an “attack.” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said it was an “outrageous act.” The EU’s High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell said in a statement, “The European Union condemns this attack in the strongest possible terms.”

Yet attribution has been slow in coming from the one nation whose intelligence community earned a great deal of respect and renewed credibility in anticipating the likelihood of Russia’s war in February 2022, almost down to the day: the United States.

“American intelligence analysts suspect that Russia was behind the dam’s destruction,” The New York Times reported on June 9, but “U.S. spy agencies still do not have any solid evidence about who was responsible.” That same day, John Kirby, the spokesperson for the National Security Council, told CNN: “We just don’t know what caused the breach of the dam.”

For Kyiv, the who, how and why of this disaster are not open questions. Andriy Yermak, the most important adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said on June 6: “At 2:50 a.m., Russian troops blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric station and its dam. I do not understand how there can be any doubt about this. Both constructions are located in the temporary Russian-occupied territories. Neither shelling nor any other external influence was capable of destroying the structures. The explosion came from within.” [Continue reading…]