With a shaming of the ‘Monaco battalion’, Ukraine marks a turning point

While Australian politics have been squabbling this past week about how to make the war in Ukraine all about us, action on the ground — and in the waters — of the country last week marked a turning point with the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s confirmation of social media’s worst kept secret: the beginning of the summer counteroffensive.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the country’s political and once-oligarchic elites are discovering an important truth: when you mobilise for a people’s war, the people will have their own demands. The result? A growing shift in power to independent media and civil society that will shape the country’s postwar society.

There’s much we don’t yet know about the collapse of the dam, although as an attack on civilian infrastructure it’s likely to turn out to be the most significant war crime since the invasion began. It is already causing the greatest ecological disaster in Europe since Chernobyl, not just in the flooded areas of southern Ukraine, but across the ecosystem of the Black Sea with Zelenskyy warning of ”sewage, oil, chemicals and possibly anthrax from animal burial sites”. Rubbish from the flooding is already washing up on Black Sea beaches. 

The United Nations has reported that about 700,000 people have lost access to drinking water and the UK Defence Intelligence Ukraine update says the collapse has “almost certainly” caused the North Crimea Canal — the main source of water for the occupied peninsula — to run dry.

In The Australian, Alan Howe reached back to the devastating history of dam collapses, particularly in war, including the myth-making “dam buster” air raids on the Möhne and Edersee dams, which flooded the German Ruhr and Eder valleys. The raids were made famous by one of Australia’s biggest-selling journalist-authors, Paul Brickhill, in his 1951 book The Dam Busters, although more recent reporting suggests that the main victims were, as in Ukraine, those living in the dam’s floodpath.

It’s not the first impact of the war on the fragile Black Sea ecology, with the BBC recently reporting thousands of endangered Black Sea dolphins and porpoises killed by “acoustic trauma” as a result of increased Russian naval sonar activity. 

The dam collapse was almost certainly caused by Russia — which has controlled the dam since the early days of 2022’s full-scale invasion — either deliberately to disrupt the looming counteroffensive (Zelenskyy warned the dam had been mined back in October and seismic data indicates an explosion occurred), or as a warning, with Ukraine releasing an intercepted recording of a Russian military exchange: “It didn’t go according to plan, and [they did] more than what they planned for.”

The New York Times, which has a 90-year history of bad takes on Ukraine, couldn’t resist turning the uncertainty into the worst of “both-sides”, leading with “Ukraine and Russia blamed each other”. 

Most of what we know about the Ukrainian counteroffensive comes from “open-source intelligence” that aggregates data from across the web, including social media. In its weekend update, US think tank the Institute for the Study of War drew on Russian and Ukrainian sources to identify four points of activity along the front line, from Luhansk in the north to western Zaporizhzhia in the south. 

Which of these are probes, feints or potential breakthroughs will start to show over the next few weeks? Strategic studies academic Phillips O’Brien wrote in his Substack newsletter this week that the main push will try to drive a wedge between the western and eastern Russian forces: “The Russians understand this and have defended the area with some of their best troops and deepest defensive lines … What we are seeing now is a major effort to weaken this defensive line.”

Behind the battlefront, Ukrainian civil society and independent media are using the passions of the war for democracy and the desire to be a normal European nation to assert an Ukrainian identity freed from the power of the country’s post-Soviet oligarchs. 

This week Sevgil Musaieva, editor-in-chief of what’s become the country’s leading independent news site, Ukrainska Pravda, described the war as the country’s third “Maidan moment” following on from the Orange Revolution in 2004 and what Ukrainians call “the Revolution of Dignity” in 2013-14 which both grew out of public protests in the Maidan, or main square, in Kyiv. 

One key goal is to ensure the postwar does not allow oligarchs to return to power. Her news site, for example, has generated a stir with its exposure of rich Ukrainians sitting out the war on the French Côte d’Azur in a series called “The Monaco Battalion”. 

Publicly shamed, she says, they suddenly reappear in Ukraine with patriotic offerings for the Ukrainian armed forces.

It’s just another indication of how human rights and an end to corruption and oligarchic power are already shaping up as key issues in what Ukrainian civil society hopes will be a postwar election in 2024.