The likely cause of the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and power plant in the early hours of Tuesday morning remains shrouded in mystery – predictably, both sides are blaming each other. But it’s important to remember that under the Geneva conventions the destruction of infrastructure such as dams and nuclear power plants are considered war crimes. (And let’s not forget that the massive Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant is just upstream and depends on water from the Kakhovka reservoir for its cooling system.)
However, at present we don’t even know for sure that the disaster was a deliberate act. The volume of water in the reservoir behind the dam was at its highest ever and there’s evidence the dam had previously been damaged.
In the immediate aftermath of the news of the dam’s collapse we asked Stefan Wolff and David Dunn, colleagues at the University of Birmingham and international security experts, to consider the news reports emerging and to ask the key question that detectives have favoured since time immemorial: cui bono – who benefits?
