Qin Hui, “Who Blew up the Kakhovka Dam?"

Qin Hui, “Who Blew up the Kakhovka Dam?”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby

Introduction

This is another in the series Qin Hui’s commentaries on the Russia-Ukraine war, perhaps the eighth. The first seven were published by FT Chinese, and I have translated all of them on my site. Qin published this on his personal Webchat feed (see details in footnote one), and noted the passages that authorities deleted before publishing; they are in italics in the text translated below. Many of his other texts were edited before publication, with some more extreme commentaries removed. I had hoped to indicate these changes, but I do not subscribe to FT Chinese, so I never quite got around to it. The translations on my site are of Qin’s original texts, without the edits; he sent me them to translate so that Western readers could have access to his commentaries.

In any event, Qin’s thoughts about “who blew up the Kahhovka dam?” – “Russia, of course” - are of a piece with his other commentaries, and condemn Russia and Putin in no uncertain terms, as well as Western appeasement of Russia. As usual, Qin appears to have been right about the dam, as confirmed by an article in the New York Times this morning (June 18, 2023). This assures us that not all Chinese intellectuals have followed the Chinese government’s stance on the conflict, although Qin is quite extreme in the Chinese context.

Qin compares the Russian destruction of the Kakhovka dam and the subsequent flooding to a similar event that occurred during the Sino-Japanese War: when Chiang Kai-shek had the army destroy dikes at Huayuankou, allowing the Yellow River to flood much of Henan province, thus blocking the advance of the Japanese Army for some years. This military “victory” came nonetheless at a tremendous cost - as many as 800,000 Chinese died in the flooding. These events are of course familiar to Chinese readers. A good summary is available here.

Translation

On the morning of June 6, 2023, the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper, Ukraine's main river, was blown up, releasing a floodtide of water. It was one of the most amazing scenes in the year-long war of Russian aggression against Ukraine.

It is not news that Russia has been doing its utmost to bomb Ukrainian infrastructure in this war. In addition to the heavy civilian casualties and the near flattening of cities like Mariupol and Bakhmut, facilities important to the economy and to the people’s livelihood, including many major power plants, have been hit by successive missile attacks, and world-renowned companies such as the former Antonov aircraft factory and the Azov steel plant have been destroyed. Although this destruction was horrific enough, it was not a large-scale, enduring ecological disaster. But blowing up large hydroelectric facilities in a river basin is a different story. If the dam is completely destroyed (the extent of the damage is not yet clear), it may be the most serious case of man-made ecological disaster caused by war since World War II, and it may be second only to the destruction of the Yellow River embankment at Huyuankou during the Sino-Japanese War in 1938 in terms of the severity of war-based hydrological disasters in the entire history of mankind.

Given the shocking consequences of the situation, neither Russia nor Ukraine admitted having carried out the act, and instead accused the other side of having done so. It is truly difficult to determine who is the guilty party given the current lack of information. Although I have been following the situation in Russia and Ukraine, I’m not like those “war fanatics” on both sides of the conflict who are completely obsessed by it, and I don’t have enough information to identify the “true killer.”

However, there are some claims that can be judged as true or false solely based on common sense. Prior to the bombing, rumors had been circulating for some months that either Ukraine or Russia might well destroy the dam. One of the rumors that was obviously false came from the famous "war correspondent" Lu Yuguang; a friend of mine who works in the same media outlet as Lu sent me his story, which said that Ukraine was trying to blow up the Kakhovka dam in order to flood the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is under Russian control! I immediately replied that Lu’s Russia reporting used to be good, but that this is utter nonsense!” My friend replied, "How would you know? Lu is on the front lines and puts out a lot of videos.” I didn’t dare to say anything else, but the idea of bombing the dam to flood the nuclear power plant is crazy. The Kakhovka reservoir has connections to the nuclear power plant (see below), but one look at a map shows that the power plant is clearly the upstream of the dam, which means the flood water will go the other way. I mean, I have never been to the moon, but if someone says it’s square, I’ll still argue with him.

So here I will use common sense to analyze the background of this event, with an eye toward identifying who is the likely culprit, Russia or Ukraine. Of course I’m only talking in terms of logical possibilities. If one of the countries is truly crazy and wants to commit suicide, then common sense is no use.

First, according to the photographs we currently have, it is clear that the hole in the Kakhovka dam caused by the explosion is near the southern bank (locally known as the left bank). We know that since the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kherson last November, the Kakhovka Dam has marked the boundary between Russia and Ukraine. Russian troops occupy the southern bank of the Dnieper, and the Ukrainian army is on the northern bank. This means that the dam was blown up in the section of the dam controlled by the Russian army.

Of course the Ukrainian army can also strike targets in Russian-controlled areas from a distance; attacks on Crimea and even Moscow are possible, so attacking something just across the river is no big deal.

But it is important to know that the dam of a huge reservoir like Kakhovka, whether it made of earth and stone or a reinforced concrete, is a giant solid body under pressure, unlike a building or a factory that may well collapse when hit by a missile. Also consider that Kakhovka is a low-head facility in a plain reservoir, whose huge capacity is mainly due to the vast size of the reservoir, and while the dam is three kilometers long, it is a low-lying dam, only thirty meters high in the center of the river, and even lower close to the south bank, where the bomb hit. In the case of a dam that is one or two hundred meters high, any damage might lead to total collapse because of the water pressure, but you cannot count on this happening with a low-lying dam like Kakhovka.

If a factory somewhere in Kakhovka exploded, a bomb might have done the trick, but bombing a dam is a different story. The Ukrainian army would have had to use bombers or missiles to destroy the dam in an air strike, and it would have had to be a massive saturation attack, but there is nothing in the news about this. In fact, there is not even a report of a one-plane, single bomb attack. If it were a matter of one plane and one bomb, which caused a fissure which they didn’t get around to fixing then the dam might eventually collapse, but it is not going to collapse all at once. But Kakhovka collapsed in the early morning of the 6th, and there was no news of a bomb attack, so if Ukraine was the culprit, how did they do it? Talking about blowing things up, Ukraine has a lot of hydroelectric power stations, and over the past few months, Russia has launched round after round of large-scale air attacks on Ukraine's strategic energy facilities, destroying thermal power plants and substations, but not a single large hydroelectric power plants was hit. Do you think that they were spared out of the kindness of Grandpa Putin’s heart? Yeah, right.

So, if it wasn’t an air strike, could they have sent agents to plant explosives to blow up a dam? It’s true that you could send agents with bombs to destroy a bridge, because if you take out a bridge pier or a section of steel girders, the bridge will collapse, but also for the reasons mentioned above, if you want to send agents to blow up a huge thing like a dam, you have dig a big hole at the base of the dam and fill it with several tons of explosives. The south section of the dam is heavily guarded by Russian troops, and if they let Ukrainian agents pull off such a thing right before their eyes, then they are no better than scarecrows. I'm afraid that even Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has repeatedly ridiculed the incompetence of the Russian army and has been harder on them than the Ukrainians, would not dare to say such a thing.

Thus the location where the bomb hit means that the Ukrainian army could not have done it, either through a long-distance attack or by sending agents—unless the Russians guarding the dam did it for them.

Now let's look at who benefits from blowing up the dam, which is an even simpler matter. The Kakhovka Dam is not far from the mouth of the Dnieper, the last dam on the downstream leg of the river, and the area between the dam and the mouth of the Dnieper has only one major city on the north bank, Ukrainian-controlled Kherson, while the Russian-controlled south bank has a very small population. The flooding caused by the collapse of the dam naturally caused huge losses for Ukraine. Kherson was the only Ukrainian provincial capital city ever captured by Russian forces over the course of the entire war since Putin lost his mind last February, and after falling on March 2, it was recovered by Ukraine on November 11 after eight months of bitter fighting, which was Ukraine's most iconic victory to date. Putin was embarrassed and furious. Do you think the idea of destroying the city never crossed his mind?

If at the start of the war, when the Russian army attacked Kherson and the Ukrainian army could not hold them back, someone had made an on the spot decision to blow up the dam to stop the Russians, just like Chiang Kai-shek did when he blew up Huayuankou to stop the Japanese, then it might be defensible from a military perspective, even if it could be criticized for the popular suffering caused. But the Ukrainian army did no such thing at that point. Now Ukraine has taken back Kherson, and the war is developing in such a way that Ukraine is talking about a counterattack, while all Russia talks about every day is how to prevent this counterattack, and Wagner and the Defense Ministry are having terrible fights over this. So in this situation Ukraine decides to blow up the dam and flood the city for no good reason? What fool would do that? By contrast, the Russian army is at wits' end and desperate to do something, and at the risk of making a huge mistake, decided to flood Kherson to stop the Ukrainian army. The logic of this seems perfectly obvious.

However, while in the short term Putin's viciousness may cause great damage to the Ukrainian-controlled zone and pose certain difficulties for Ukraine’s counter-offensive (if the Ukrainian army meant to launch their counter-offensive on the downstream section of the Dnieper), from a deeper, longer-term perspective, it is the current Russian-controlled zone, and Crimea in particular, that has the most to lose from the destruction of the Kakhovka reservoir. Although such long-term losses do not affect the current situation, and it is impossible that Ukraine blew up the dam for the purpose of long-term losses that have no military significance at all, if Putin was willing to sacrifice Crimea's future in order to block the Ukrainian army in the short term, it may mean that he is not so confident in his ability to hold Crimea and that if can’t have it, he will destroy it no matter what.

The explanation is simple: the Kakhovka reservoir was built at the time in large part to supply water to the Crimea and the area south of the Dnieper. Among the six large reservoirs built on the Dnieper River during the Soviet period, the Kakhovka reservoir, with a capacity of 18.2 billion cubic meters, has the largest volume and the widest inundation area, while the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station, with a capacity of 320,000 kilowatts, is the smallest. Moreover, this huge reservoir was built at the downstream end of the "dragon's tail," and plays no role in regulating water flow like other facilities located nearer to the “dragon’s head.” And in order to build this reservoir, they not only flooded a great deal of fertile land, as well as more than 90 villages and towns, but also submerged some important monuments, including a late capital city of the Golden Horde. So, why did they build this project in the first place?

It turns out that the reservoir was built not primarily to generate electricity or to help regulate the water flow on the river, but instead to supply water to the south of the Dnieper, especially to Crimea. We know that the rainfall of the northern coast of the Black Sea in the former Soviet Union decreases significantly from north to south, and the area north of the Perekop Isthmus and the Crimean Peninsula suffered from drought and water shortage, which seriously restricted the development of the region. After the construction of the Kakhovka Dam, the famous North Crimea Canal was built on the southern bank of the dam to bring the water of the Dnieper River from the reservoir through the canal to Crimea, and it in fact became the main source of water.

In other words, the Kakhovka Reservoir-North Crimea Canal project was largely a project to divert the Dnieper for the benefit of Crimea. Before Crimea was annexed by Russia, 85% of its water supply came from the Dnieper River, and was supplied by the Kakhovka reservoir. After Crimea's annexation, Ukraine closed the canal, reducing Crimea's cultivated area from 130,000 hectares in 2013 to 14,000 hectares in 2017. Many believe that Crimea's water supply problems may be one of the key reasons for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, one of the first things Russia did after the fall of Kherson and Kakhovka dam areas was to restore the water supply to the canal.

But now Russia has gone to the lengths of destroying the Kakhovka reservoir in order to flood Kherson and stall the Ukrainian counter-offensive, once again cutting the water to the canal and causing a crisis in Crimea. Although the extent to which damage to the dam has affected water delivery in unknown, it would be completely illogical for the Ukrainian side to blow up the dam and flood Kherson, which it had already recovered, in order to cut off water to Crimea, which currently has no military significance, and directly cause difficulties for its own counter-offensive. As for Putin, he is prioritizing short-term military interests with an eye toward hurting people in the short-term (flooding Kherson) and risking long-term damage to himself (the Crimea water crisis). Aside from showing once again how vicious he is, I also get a whiff of Chiang Kai-shek’s desperation when he did the same thing in 1938.

Let's put it like this: if Ukraine’s counter-offensive includes the idea of eventually retaking Crimea, it would never do such an absurd and useless thing like flooding Kherson and incurring significant self-damage, problematizing a southern counterattack and increasing the difficulties of governing Crimea in the future. And even if Ukraine is not all that confident about retaking Crimea, it would not be so "suicidal" for the sake of short-term military and political interests. Again, the only scenario in which Ukraine blows up the dam is when Russia is attacking Kherson, and Ukraine is desperate. That was in March of last year and Ukraine did not do it. At the present moment, Ukraine has been mounting a counter-offensive in the area downstream from the dam for six months, so why would they do it?

And if Putin wanted to cross the Dnieper and attack, he would of course not blow up the dam. Even if he has changed to a defensive position and blowing up the dam might help him to defend the Dnieper, he would not have destroyed the project to divert the Dnieper for the benefit of Crimea, cutting the Crimean bloodline, as long as he still had confidence in holding the Crimea. Only if his confidence in holding Crimea is shaken will he throw caution to the wind and opt for a life-or-death struggle like this. After all, if the war is lost, Putin has already blood on his hands that he will never wash clean, so why not sacrifice Crimea if it suits his fancy of the moment?

To be honest, I myself am not that optimistic about a Ukraine victory, but great emperor Putin perhaps sees things more clearly than I do, and all of this may tell us something about how the war is evolving.

But there is no comparison between Putin's blowing up Kakhovka and Chiang Kai-shek's blowing up Huayuankou, except that it shows that "dictators are not afraid to kill people” (which does not mean that the people under their rule are not afraid to die). When Chiang Kai-shek's blew up Huayuankou, it created a muddy yellow floodplain thousands of kilometers wide, and although the losses to the people were very heavy (even if Wen Shanzhang, an expert on river governance, has pointed out that the actual losses were not as severe as later exaggerated for political motives, they were still bad enough), the military impact was also considerable: not only did it immediately prevent the Japanese from capturing the strategic hub of Zhengzhou, which was close at hand, but from 1938, when the dike was blown up, until 1944, when the Japanese launched their doomsday attack to "open up the mainland line of communication,” there was indeed a six-year period when the Chinese and Japanese forces were divided by the water released by Chiang’s action. So we might say that blowing up the dike played a certain role in bringing the war to a stalemate and putting an end to the unstoppable Japanese offensive, although Chiang's callousness is not to be commended.

What then can we say about Putin and Kakhovka? Setting aside the fact that the military situation in Russia today is far less critical than China’s in the face of the Japanese army's offensive, his actions show only that he cares less about whether people live or die (including his own subjects) than did Chiang Kai-shek. Think about it. The location of the dam is only a hundred kilometers from the mouth of the Dnieper, which is nothing like the situation in China during the war. The area flooded by the destruction of the dam is very small in the context of the overall Russia-Ukraine confrontation, and the idea of stopping Ukraine's counterattack by blowing up the dam has no strategic value. The only factor that can stop Ukraine's counter-offensive is the West's appeasement of Russia.

Of course, in addition to the attempt to flood Kherson, what is more worrisome about the dam explosion is the safety of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. As mentioned earlier, the Enerhodar region, where the plant is located, is upstream of the dam, and Lu Yuguang's claim that Ukraine was going to flood the plant by blowing up the dam is simply irresponsible and a disregard for common sense. But while the plant is not likely to be flooded, the Dnieper is its source for the water it needs for cooling purposes. With the dam blown up, the water level in the reservoir could drop, which might lead to a nuclear disaster like the Fukushima core meltdown.

I think that unless Putin deliberately engages in such mischief, such consequences are highly unlikely. We know that the Fukushima disaster was indeed caused by a tsunami that flooded and destroyed the pumps that circulated the water necessary for cooling, and by the fact that damages to roads and transportation meant that replacement equipment could not be brought in (they tried to bring in replacement pumps by helicopter, but the pumps were too large and did not work). The plant in Ukraine is not flooded, and the cooling equipment is still intact, even if the water level has dropped. As I noted above, Kakhovka is a shallow plain reservoir, and even if the water drops to the lowest possible level, it will only increase the pump lift by about ten meters. The design of a nuclear power plant of this size would not be without such safety margins, and it would be very strange to have a nuclear power plant explode because of a problem with the reservoir when the main equipment is still working properly. I believe that even if the water level drops below the cooling intake, they can think of a temporary fix. After all, the nuclear power plant cooling has been pumping water all along, and it is not the same thing as the North Crimea Canal, where once the water level in the reservoir falls below the level of the canal there is nothing to be done.

Of course, no one can guarantee that nothing will happen to the nuclear power plant. In fact, any nuclear power plant in the hands of Putin is already in a precarious position, and the dam explosion tells everything we need to know about the man's heartlessness and unscrupulousness. If Putin can blow up the dam, who can guarantee that he will not blow up the nuclear power plant in a fit of desperation? So to ensure the safety of the nuclear power plants, there is no choice but to drive the Russian troops out of Ukraine.

Notes

[1]秦晖, “谁炸毁了卡霍夫卡大坝?” originally published on Qin’s Webchat platform, 雁塔秦川, on June 9, 2023.