EXPLOSION OF KAHAVSKY HEPP: PUTIN'S LAST RED LINE BEFORE NUCLEAR WEAPONS

 

EXPLOSION OF KAHAVSKY HEPP: PUTIN'S LAST RED LINE BEFORE NUCLEAR WEAPONS

 

In mid-August 1864, the Swiss government invited representatives of most European countries, as well as the USA, Brazil and Mexico, to a unique diplomatic conference. Sixteen countries sent their delegates to Geneva, who approved and adopted the first Geneva Convention at the conference held on August 22, 1864.

This was the beginning of a major process lasting almost 100 years, during which four international treaties and three additional protocols were adopted, establishing modern international legal standards for the conduct of hostilities. In other words, these became the new "rules of war", which almost 200 countries later undertook not to violate (the USSR ratified the Geneva Conventions in 1954).

In addition to the Geneva Conventions, the world community also adopted a number of other international legal treaties (Rome Statute, Hague Conventions and Declarations, etc.), which categorically prohibited warring parties from killing the civilian population, torturing prisoners, and using lethal weapons in populated areas. etc.

Despite the fact that Russia belongs to the participating states and the Geneva Conventions and most other international treaties, from the very first days of the full-scale war in Ukraine, the armed forces of the Russian Federation, as well as terrorist formations supported by it, systematically and most cynically began to violate all norms international humanitarian law.

A month and a half after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) noted that the actions of the Russian military constitute a whole system that clearly qualifies as crimes against humanity. And already at the end of May 2022, an independent report prepared by researchers in the field of genocide was released, which stated that there is enough evidence that Russia is organized at the state level inciting genocide and taking actions aimed at the destruction of the Ukrainian people.

Massacre in Buch, airstrikes on the Mariupol maternity hospital and drama theater, rocket attack on the Kramatorsk railway station, mass murders in Trostyanka, Borodyanka, Irpen and many other Ukrainian cities and villages, thousands of recorded cases of torture and rape of the civilian population, including children under 5 years of age, execution of prisoners of war without trial and investigation, total looting. This list of crimes of the Russian military can be enumerated for a very long time. As of 06/05/2023, the Prosecutor's Office of Ukraine and international human rights organizations have registered

91,419 war crimes committed by the armed forces of the Russian Federation!

And now, a year after the start of a full-scale war, it seemed that there were no longer any "red lines" that the aggressor country had not yet crossed. Everyone is so used to the fact that Russia is on the edge of evil and that its soldiers behave in Ukraine like real bandits and terrorists, that regular shelling of residential areas in Kyiv or Kharkiv have become an integral part of daily news reports. However, on the night of June 6, Russia committed a kind of unprecedented terrorist act, which once again made the whole world shudder.

The undermining of the Kakhovskaya HPP, which led to an unimaginable man-made and humanitarian disaster in recent decades, undoubtedly became one of the most egregious crimes committed by the Russian military during the entire period of the war.

Article 56 of Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949 for the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts:

"Installations and constructions containing dangerous forces, namely: dams, dams and nuclear power plants, should not become objects of attack, even in cases where such objects are military objects, if such an attack could cause release dangerous forces and subsequent heavy casualties among the civilian population. Other military objects located in these installations or structures or near them should not become objects of attack, if such an attack could cause the release of dangerous forces in such installations or structures and subsequent heavy casualties among the civilian population."

Only in the first 24 hours after the destruction of the dam, colossal masses of water rushed into the Dnipro (30 thousand cubic meters per second). More than 70 settlements were flooded, some of them were completely submerged. After 48 hours, the flooded area was already at least 600 km2, for comparison it is equal to the area of such cities as Madrid (607.00 km2) or Chicago (589.60 km2). According to the preliminary data of the volunteers, the number of dead among the civilian population, only on the left bank of the Dnieper held by the occupiers, amounted to more than 200 people, several hundred more are considered missing. Tens of thousands of people immediately became homeless. Irreparable damage was caused to the ecology: hundreds of tons of oil and chemicals entered the Dnipro River, 5 thousand hectares of forests were flooded, a total plague of fish occurred in the Kherson, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhya and Dnipropetrovsk regions, tens of thousands of animals were destroyed, including rare red book species. As a result of the destruction of the dam, 94% of irrigation systems in the Kherson region, 74% in the Zaporizhia region, and 30% in the Dnipropetrovsk region remained without water. According to the statement of the Ministry of Agriculture of Ukraine, 584,000 hectares of agricultural land will soon turn into a desert.

Almost immediately after the dam broke, hundreds of Ukrainian volunteers headed to the Kherson region, where a large-scale rescue operation is still ongoing. People and animals who were in a terrible trap were evacuated, despite the shelling from the occupiers. According to volunteers and eyewitnesses, the occupiers continue to fire at medics and rescuers in a targeted manner. Thus, on June 8, two employees of the State Emergency Service, one policeman, a doctor and a volunteer from Germany were seriously injured during artillery fire. And on June 11, Russian troops opened massive fire on rescue boats in which pensioners were being evacuated. As a result of the shelling, 21 people were seriously injured, three were killed. Also, according to video materials that were published on the telegram channel "Times of Ukraine", the Russian military demanded money from volunteers for a pass to the right bank, where tens of thousands of people are also waiting for evacuation.

It was said in October 2022 that Russia was preparing to blow up the Kakhovskaya HPP. Both President Zelenskyi and the GUR have repeatedly stated that, according to available information, the Russian military mined most of the dam and some units of the hydroelectric plant. The fact that the dam was destroyed precisely as a result of the explosion is confirmed by the data of seismologists. In particular, the Romanian measuring station "BURAR", which is located 620 km from the epicenter, recorded clear seismic signals coinciding in time and location with the destruction of the dam. These signals indicate that an explosion occurred at the site of the hydroelectric power plant, which caused seismic tremors with a magnitude of almost 2 points. The seismologists of the Norwegian institute "NORSAR" also hold this opinion.

By the way, on the morning of June 6, a few minutes after the explosion, almost all the Russian warlords and propagandists actively began to spread the news that the Kakhovskaya HPP dam was blown up by the Russian Armed Forces, due to which Ukraine's plans for a counteroffensive were thwarted. Some pro-government Telegram channels directly wrote that "the command ordered to wash away the Nazis." However, only a few hours later, apparently when the Kremlin realized the scale of the tragedy, the reports about the involvement of the Russian military quickly disappeared and all the propaganda began to work in concert blaming Kyiv for the event.

So why did Russia commit this unprecedented terrorist attack? Was it a strategic mistake or an act of intimidation, a kind of blackmail? Military experts in this matter adhere to the point of view that on the eve of the counteroffensive of the Armed Forces, the Russian army found itself in a very vulnerable position, and by undermining the HPP they tried to buy time for redeployment.

"According to the intelligence, having breached the dam, the Russians intended only to flood the islands downstream of the Dnieper, which, in their opinion, should have made it impossible to quickly push through for a counterattack by the Armed Forces. They certainly achieved this objective, however, due to a poorly executed plan, they also killed scores of their own soldiers and officers and lost huge amounts of arms and ammunition. In addition, the flood swept away the entire first line of Russian fortifications and trenches. From a military point of view, they did much more damage to themselves than they wanted to do to the Ukrainian army," says Colonel Glen Grant, an expert of the Ukrainian Institute of National Security and Defense.

Nataliya Gumenyuk, head of the coordinating press center of the Defense Forces of the South, shares this opinion:

"They were so tired of waiting from which direction it would take place (counteroffensive - ed.) that any activity of the Defense Forces, including the strengthening of counterbattery work, led to the fact that their nerves simply could not stand it. They are trying to increase the area of the water surface so that the Ukrainian defense forces do not resort to forcing. They realize that now there are actually no safe places of deployment for them on the left bank."

Some political analysts see the undermining of the dam as another attempt by the Kremlin to intimidate not so much Ukraine as the West, which supports it. After all, the fact that the Kakhovskaya HPP was being mined has been talked about for a long time, but the West saw in this, rather, Putin's usual show of force and emotional blackmail, and did not believe that Russia was actually capable of blowing up the HPP. Likewise, since the beginning of the war, there have been discussions about whether Putin is capable of using nuclear weapons. And in this regard, the majority of Western leaders are again inclined to the fact that this is unlikely. However, today, after Russia once again proved to the whole world that there are no red lines for it, it becomes very, very risky to say that Putin is not capable of using nuclear weapons. The undermining of the dam, and the resulting humanitarian and ecological catastrophe of biblical proportions, should, in fact, finally debunk all the illusions of the West that Russia is somehow capable of waging war with honest methods and that it can be perceived as something other than a terrorist formation.

 

 

Vaan Martirosyan, 11.06.20223