Via gCaptain:
Jonathan Linday at Reuters reports How Water Has Been Weaponised In Ukraine.
MYKOLAIV, Ukraine, Oct 22 (Reuters) – Sveta has no doubt about why the Ukrainian-held southern city of Mykolaiv, a ship-building center that is home to a half a million people, has gone without fresh water for the past six months.
“They (the Russians) are committing genocide against us,” she growled as she waited this week with dozens of others to fill containers with water from tanks hauled to a downtown thoroughfare aboard an electric tramway repair car...
...The Russians, Ukrainian officials say, closed the city’s freshwater intakes in the adjacent Kherson province after they overran the region as part of what Putin calls “a special military operation.”
“We don’t know whether this was an intentional explosion or an accidental ammunition strike,” municipal water chief Borys Dydenko told Reuters. He said he believed the Russians shut the intakes to avenge Ukraine’s closure of freshwater supplies to Crimea in 2014. The Kremlin and the Russian defense ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
It’s part of Russia’s larger strategy behind attacking civilian infrastructure targets. There’s a particular logic to it. If you can’t beat the Ukrainian military on the battlefield, make it impossible for the civilian population to keep supporting them.
“Ukraine’s water infrastructure, from dams to water treatment and wastewater systems, has been extensively targeted by Russia,” Gleick wrote in an email. International law, he noted, makes striking civilian infrastructure a war crime.
In just the first three months of the war, Gleick said, he and his colleagues documented more than 60 instances in which Ukraine’s civilian water supplies were disrupted and dams for both water and hydroelectric power attacked.
Russia has acknowledged targeting power plants while also saying it makes every effort to spare the civilian population. The United Nations has confirmed more than 14,000 civilian deaths and says actual numbers are likely considerably higher.
Ukraine, according to the Pacific Institute’s database, has occasionally also used water as a weapon, cutting supplies off to Crimea after Russia seized the peninsula in 2014.
Also worth a read: OP-ED Russian Navy Will Keep Attacking Transportation Infrastructure
OP-ED by Benjamin Jensen (American University, TheConversation) In response to massive battlefield setbacks, Russia has increased its attacks in Ukraine on everything from power plants and dams to railways, pipelines and ports.
These attacks against civilian infrastructure are not random. Rather, they reflect an insidious calculus integral to modern Russian military theory. For more than 20 years, Russian military journals have emphasized the need to conduct noncontact warfare and target critical infrastructure.
As a defense strategist with close to 20 years of military experience, I believe the world should brace for additional strikes as Moscow seeks ways to reestablish an upper hand in the conflict and make up for its declining battlefield position...
Robert Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers has as part of the story a description of a raid by troopers in powered armor. They are doing a combat drop onto a city of a planet allied with an alien species that has attacked Earth. It’s a hit and run operation designed not so much to cause mass destruction (they have planet-busters for that) as to demonstrate to the target population how easily their lived can be disrupted by surgical strikes — and how little they can do to stop it.
During the raid, the main character Juan Rico is busy trying to stay alive while also making sure the weapons he is carrying are used to maximum effect. To that end, one of the objectives for high priority is taking out the city’s water supply. While that might not seem as important as taking out an armory, an industrial complex, or an air base, there’s a certain logic to it.
Quite simply, a city can be rendered unlivable if there is no drinkable water available to it. Its value as a resource to support military efforts can be canceled with relatively little destruction. Water is a basic need that can’t be ignored. So, brutal as Russian targeting of civilian infrastructure may seem, there’s a certain military logic to it.
In the novel, which is fiction, the tactic proves to be effective. The targeted planet chooses to stop supporting the enemy. In Ukraine it’s certainly creating problems but whether it will force Ukraine to sue for peace remains to be seen. It is perhaps too ironic that Putin’s attempts to ‘Russify’ Ukraine amount to bringing Ukraine’s standard of living down to Russian levels.
Meanwhile in the U.S., the Mississippi is at serious lows. It doesn’t take enemy action to have critical water issues.
By Kim Chipman (Bloomberg) –“Serious concerns” over critically low water levels in the Mississippi River system led port authorities to limit vessel drafts near a key export hub, potentially adding a further headache for shippers already contending with delays and skyrocketing costs.
The US Coast Guard said in a statement late Friday that ships’ draft depth would be limited to 41 feet upriver of the port of Baton Rouge, the nation’s eighth-largest by tonnage. That’s down from 45 feet, a level at which vessels are encountering problems as drought dries up the waterway.
The move is an attempt to head off possible safety hazards as shippers contend with a backlog of barges and ocean vessels tasked with picking up and delivering core commodities such as grains, petroleum, coal, metals and fertilizer. The Mississippi typically moves more than 500 million tons of freight a year valued at more than $100 billion, according to government data.
The article reports multiple sections of the river are closed to traffic, with 1,800+ barges effectively stranded by low water levels. This is going to be a hit to the economy and also doesn’t bode well for agriculture also affected by the drought. It also doesn’t mean there won’t be flooding in the spring either; climate change is climate uncertainty.
If the world would get as serious about climate as it seems to be about military confrontation, we might actually start to turn things around. A question that has to be keeping military planners awake at night is how soon before climate issues trigger military conflict beyond what is already happening, and what if climate disasters make countries unable to defend themselves because of economic/environmental collapse?
These are questions no one wants answered.
