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The Nova Kakhovka Hydroelectric dam in Ukraine has been blown open

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Re: The Nova Kakhovka Hydroelectric dam in Ukraine has been blown open

#281
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how? if it's a war then isn't it legitimate to destroy energy sources?

Destroying dams is explicitly a war crime.

wanted to take you up on the "explicitly" then just googled it myself. in deed the additional protocol i of the geneva convention has something explicit to say about dams.

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"[...] the Nova Kakhovka dam has been earmarked as a potential target for [...] its strategic importance"

"Its destruction would have a number of significant repercussions [...] for Ukraine’s wider war effort."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/nova-kakhovka-...

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"2. The special protection against attack provided for in paragraph 1 shall cease:

(a) for a dam or a dyke only if it is used for other than its normal function and in regular, significant and direct support of military operations and if such attack is the only feasible way to terminate such support;"

https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v2/rule42

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don't know whether or not this constraint applies. i'm anyway not really intending to justify this or russia's attack on ukraine in general. just don't like pointing out cruelty in wars as if it's a surprise this is happening. war is about killing more soldiers than your opponent and there never was a war not impacting civilians. many people seem to think: "i'm against war except if it's fought fair and without killing children, elderly, women, handicapped people and civilians in general."

Re: The Nova Kakhovka Hydroelectric dam in Ukraine has been blown open

#282
post #273
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, that we don't have access to up-to-date Russian military records. Is he really Russian soldier? If he is, can we guarantee that the video is not digitally created (deep fake)? If we guarantee the both, what is the motivation for Russian soldier to say it and what situation led to this video? Do we know, that this soldier was indeed responsible to be close to the dam? It is so difficult to say what is…

> The problem is, that we don't have access to up-to-date Russian military records. Is he really Russian soldier? If he is, can we guarantee that the video is not digitally created (deep fake)? If we guarantee the both, what is the motivation for Russian soldier to say it and what situation led to this video? Do we know, that this soldier was indeed responsible to be close to the dam? You got evidence and now you're…

> You got evidence and now you're trying to discredit that evidence.

I am trying to say that our definitions of evidence are not the same anymore.

It is just a video online. Without any other supporting factors, it stays like that. Evidence requires connection to the context, and we can't verify that.

> Indeed it is, I have a feeling you really don't care much about the truth are just here to try and muddy the waters.

I care about the truth. But I also don't like that people can't see over their own biases. (e.g. not considering that someone else than Russia could do something for their own benefit)

Re: The Nova Kakhovka Hydroelectric dam in Ukraine has been blown open

#283
post #282
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is, that we don't have access to up-to-date Russian military records. Is he really Russian soldier? If he is, can we guarantee that the video is not digitally created (deep fake)? If we guarantee the both, what is the motivation for Russian soldier to say it and what situation led to this video? Do we know, that this soldier was indeed responsible to be close to the dam? You got evidence and now you're…

> You got evidence and now you're trying to discredit that evidence. I am trying to say that our definitions of evidence are not the same anymore. It is just a video online. Without any other supporting factors, it stays like that. Evidence requires connection to the context, and we can't verify that. > Indeed it is, I have a feeling you really don't care much about the truth are just here to try and muddy the waters…

> I am trying to say that our definitions of evidence are not the same anymore. It is just a video online. Without any other supporting factors, it stays like that. Evidence requires connection to the context, and we can't verify that.

It's literally video evidence of the Russians pretty much admitting it and you're doing your best to try say theres no way to know its real.

> I care about the truth. But I also don't like that people can't see over their own biases. (e.g. not considering that someone else than Russia could do something for their own benefit)

I care about the truth as well, but it's worth knowing that people who 'question' everything generally have an ulterior motive and don't really care about the truth. Whats the points in arguing if all the evidence is deep faked?.

Theres no proof anything you said is true, tonnes of proof the Russians blew up the damn.

Here's another video of them saying they want to blow the dam, but I'm sure you'll come up with some reason why this video could be fake too.

https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/16660615320803614...

I'll welcome any proof that all this evidence the Russians blew up the dam is fake, but so far there is none.

Re: The Nova Kakhovka Hydroelectric dam in Ukraine has been blown open

#284
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, the reservoir won't empty completely. Second, if it were there will be meters of mud on the bottom of it. It's possibly more impassable when empty.

In short term yeah, it will probably be too muddy. But it will dry over time and in the long term this unlocked a completely new axis of attack for Ukrainians. Similarly in the downstream regions. The water will go away eventually and it will be much easier for Ukrainians to attack in the future, when the Russians will not have the capability to flood the downstream regions with this dam.

The Dnipro is still a large river to cross and it's not going away. I looked at it in Google Maps and it's at least 500 m wide before and after the reservoir.

Btw, Google added the flooding marks to the map.

Re: The Nova Kakhovka Hydroelectric dam in Ukraine has been blown open

#285
post #280
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't support Ukraine in this conflict for different reasons, one of which is that in case of their victory my family will loose everything and I'll end up in jail (and that's best case). Why would this happen?.

In the unlikely event of retaking Crimea, Ukraine is going to prosecute collaborators, cancel _all_ property deals after 2014, and expel Russian citizens who never had Ukrainian citizenship. I have received Russian citizenship, some of my family members have been Russian citizens all their life, and I have inherited, sold, and bought property after 2014. And while it is not clear who is going to be considered a colla…

> In the unlikely event of retaking Crimea, Ukraine is going to prosecute collaborators, cancel _all_ property deals after 2014, and expel Russian citizens who never had Ukrainian citizenship. I have received Russian citizenship, some of my family members have been Russian citizens all their life, and I have inherited, sold, and bought property after 2014. And while it is not clear who is going to be considered a collaborator, nobody who received Russian citizenship is safe (which means nobody at all).

Based on this.

> I have received Russian citizenship

You should be okay, I think they will recognise most people faced the choice of getting Russian citizenship or potentially very bad things happening to them, as long as you where Ukrainian before I don't see the issue.

> and I have inherited, sold, and bought property after 2014.

This is on you my friend, you knowingly sold, and bough property that was in essence stolen.

> And while it is not clear who is going to be considered a collaborator, nobody who received Russian citizenship is safe (which means nobody at all).

I don't think this is true, if you weren't overtly fighting or collaborating with the Russians I don't think the Ukrainians will do much.

Re: The Nova Kakhovka Hydroelectric dam in Ukraine has been blown open

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Collapsed due to damage“. Looks pretty clearly like an explosion. Russian state news agency. The fine folks that bring news reports like “local nerd found hitting himself by school bully”

Interesting follow-up by the same poster here, quoting WaPo tweeting some Maxar photos, showing that the dam seems to have suffered some damage in the past week - adding credence to the possibility that it did, in fact, "collapsed due to damage", without either side specifically pulling the trigger today. https://twitter.com/AricToler/status/1665937030222692352 But that brings up the question, what was happening ther…

[deleted]

Re: The Nova Kakhovka Hydroelectric dam in Ukraine has been blown open

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>This also leaves the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in danger of having no cooling left, the same Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant that It does not work like that, the plant is in cold shutdown and has all the water it needs. Also, the water is taken from the bottom of the reservoir/river. >had been shelled by Ukrainians in the lest six to eight months with not even a slap on the wrist from the Westerners. You forgot to add t…

It’s clear that we live in totally two separate worlds. Time will tell.

This recent event also made me aware that the Ukrainian men that I see daily here in the streets of Bucharest have not run away from the Russians, but from some of their fellow Ukrainians.

Re: The Nova Kakhovka Hydroelectric dam in Ukraine has been blown open

#288
post #280
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't support Ukraine in this conflict for different reasons, one of which is that in case of their victory my family will loose everything and I'll end up in jail (and that's best case). Why would this happen?.

In the unlikely event of retaking Crimea, Ukraine is going to prosecute collaborators, cancel _all_ property deals after 2014, and expel Russian citizens who never had Ukrainian citizenship. I have received Russian citizenship, some of my family members have been Russian citizens all their life, and I have inherited, sold, and bought property after 2014. And while it is not clear who is going to be considered a colla…

I find it very unlikely that they would imprison, essentially, the entire remaining pre-2014 population of Crimea on the sole basis of having received a Russian passport. It's going to be a large problem in the occupied territories as well, as people have been refused medical care and other necessities unless accepting a Russian passport or in some cases threatened and tortured. Separating out those who were under genuine duress from those who enthusiastically accepted is an intractable problem, so the bar would need to be set somewhat higher.

Given that 10+ million Ukrainians have lost their homes or forced to relocate, entire destroyed cities, the extensive mining of Ukrainian territory etc. it is difficult to be especially sympathetic to non-Crimean Russian settlers who might lose their property.

Re: The Nova Kakhovka Hydroelectric dam in Ukraine has been blown open

#289
post #204

Worth noting that this may still turn out to be accidental, in the sense that all the bombing activity around it triggered sufficient cracking in the wrong places that the normal forces (made worse by high water levels) caused a failure. To be clear, I'm not saying that this wasn't a strike, or a demolition, just that it could be an unintended failure caused by precision strikes performed on targets very near to the…

Discussion of this dam by the author of those posts: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,5924.msg39559...

“OTOH, what gives me a bit of pause in going "It's a deliberate demolition" is that when I try to wrap my head around a plan for how you'd do this for a dam of this type (concrete gravity dam with spillway and powerhouse using intake sections), it gets to be extremely complicated very quickly. If you just had one huge bomb--and this would include airstrikes as well as a bomb on a truck or suspended from a barge in the forebay--you'd disrupt a couple of monoliths, and then this basically rounds to the same problem I pointed out above: why doesn't the progression stop after the disrupted monoliths slide downstream and the pool starts to drop?

But if you wanted to go and do demo on each monolith, that's...a very elaborate operation. Not impossible for a military to conduct, but it's hard for me to believe that it would have escaped notice until now. I'd expect to have seen a bunch of video of Russian soldiers spending weeks putting demo on each monolith, including having drilling rigs out there. People tend to have an overly-optimistic view of how easy it is to do a surreptitious controlled demolition, and it's harder when dealing with a structure that mainly functions by just being so damn heavy that water can't push it downstream--you need to either remove mass or disrupt the structure of the dam long enough for the reservoir to push it out of the way, which either means really big bombs that are probably easily visible, or super-elaborate placement of a bunch of small ones, which is also easily visible.”

Re: The Nova Kakhovka Hydroelectric dam in Ukraine has been blown open

#290
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funding this war (which we're losing) is gutting funding for further education and scientific research. It's possible there's a secret plan which will turn things around, but it seems more likely that the only thing which benefits from our inevitable defeat is the arms industry.

How are we losing? Ukraine was supposed to fall in days. For them, even holding the line isn't losing, and they've pushed the line back. I talked about politics that I don't like here it is: the west is not losing, it's winning substantially. Even if Ukraine doesn't win back territory, the west sees Russia bash itself against a wall losing men and equipment, and showing its hand operationally. And the amount spent is…

> And the amount spent is a pittance to western governments

I don't consider well north of $100billion and climbing to be a pittance.

> We could, and imo we should, give Ukraine to means to win.

And yet we haven't. The Ukrainians are still rationing artillery fire, appear to have lost most of their air defence cover and long ago lost air cover.

If we were serious about winning the US government would have switched to a planned economy (as we did in WW2), taken control of munitions production and gotten a handle on our out of control military contract padding.

> But I would say there is a calculation going on the US about stringing out the war longer

That's certainly one way to spin trying to lose more slowly.

> Also what outcome do you want? We surely don't want Russia to win this and think its great and start more wars and repress more people. I think we should care at least.

a negotiated peace. Tricky given all of the times the US has betrayed Russian trust over the last ten years. The only plausible route feels like a massive neutral DMZ (probably everything east of the Dnipro) administered by a BRICS led UN peace keeping force.

Hugely embarrassing for the West and NATO, but would end the killing and devastation and allow us to concentrate on the real threat of climate change.

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