A Dam Is Destroyed in Ukraine

Jun 12, 2023

An explosion at a dam on the Dnipro River in Ukraine caused extensive flooding and environmental damage. Many villages and part of the city of Kherson were flooded and tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes; unrecorded numbers of people died.

It is not clear who or what caused the explosion. The Ukrainian and the Russian sides in the war blamed each other. What is clear is that this dam explosion and flooding added to the devastation that the people of the region have suffered during this war. And it is clear that neither the Ukrainian nor the Russian regimes even tried to mobilize their militaries to support people who suffered from the flood.

But least of all did help come from the government most responsible for continuing this war with all its death and destruction—that is, the U.S. government. A few days after the dam collapse, Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak met to promise more money to Ukraine. The money was not for the aid that is desperately needed by those people displaced by the flood, but rather it is more money for Ukraine to continue the war. Biden said the U.S. government would continue to send military weapons “for as long as it takes.”

The war has already gone on for 16 months, and regardless of who struck the first blow, U.S. policy is what set in motion the events that led to the war in Ukraine and has guaranteed the war continues.

Before the war even started, the U.S. and NATO were training Ukrainian troops and supplying them with weapons, establishing another threat to Russia, right on its border, like all the other former parts of the old Soviet Union pulled into NATO. Once the war started, the U.S. and NATO provided Ukraine with an escalating supply of tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, rockets, guns and enough military weaponry to keep the war going. The U.S. has supplied intelligence and helped plan Ukrainian strategy. It has done everything except provide the soldiers. Ukrainian soldiers act as U.S. proxies to do the dying in this war.

Up until now, the policy of the U.S. government has been to continue the war as long as possible, with the goal in mind to weaken the Russian regime. Since last fall, the U.S. government has talked for months about a “spring offensive” to justify sending more tanks and armored vehicles and fighter jets to Ukraine. Lately those armaments have been used inside Russia, including by forces fighting inside the borders of Russia—neo-Nazi groups, similar to the right-wing groups that were incorporated into Ukraine’s military.

This is the U.S. government’s war, plain and simple, and U.S. government policies have pushed this war to continue, leading to hundreds of thousands of people, Ukrainians and Russians, being killed and wounded. This continuing war has meant that millions of Ukrainians have been displaced from their homes and much of the infrastructure of the country has been destroyed.

Now a dam has been blown up and a large area is flooded and uninhabitable. That is another consequence of U.S. policy, no matter how it happened.