Dnieper

• I spent time talking with a wide range of people – including soldiers, civilians and priests.
• People in Kyiv live in a near-constant state of alert, with regular air raid sirens, but life in other ways goes on.

Daily life in Ukraine

• At first, I relied on the people around me to help determine a course of action when an air siren sounded.
• But after a few days I started to turn to the same Telegram channels to better gauge the potential severity of the situation.
• I even saw a crowded bungee-jumping event one weekend as people jumped from a pedestrian bridge over the Dnieper River in Kyiv.
• The flags of other countries that have supported Ukraine are there as well.

What Ukrainians want

• About 84% of Ukrainians said in May 2023 that they were not ready to give Russia territorial concessions, according to the Ukrainian independent research group Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
• Meanwhile, Ukrainians are also still looking to outside Western support, and looking for countries including the U.S. to join in a mutual-defense pact that would obligate them to send in their own troops.
• About 89% of Ukrainians wanted Ukraine to become a NATO member in May 2023, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
• In 2021, only 48% of Ukrainians supported Ukraine’s NATO membership.
• And in 2022, a record high 83% of Ukrainians said they wanted to join.

Do Ukrainians have a breaking point?

• In May 2023, 78% of Ukrainians said close family members or friends had been wounded or killed since February 2022, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
• I’m not afraid that Ukrainians will tire of being attacked by Russians,” she explained.
• “Of course, every person has a breaking point, but there is no way back now.
• I know many soldiers who are prepared to fight if the war drags on, even if for years,” the volunteer said.

• Crops in fields and orchards in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia region were inundated, then left to shrivel after the water drained.
• We are a U.S. political scientist with research expertise on the post-Soviet region and a Ukrainian economist who studies agriculture.
• While the long-term effects of the dam break are difficult to calculate, we believe that it will have a lasting impact on the climate of southern Ukraine.
• Agricultural production could be reduced for years to come, with impacts that ripple through supply chains and affect food security around the world.

A fertile farming region

• Local villages and towns came to depend on water and electricity from the dam and its reservoir.
• Some 545,000 acres (220,000 hectares) of arable land in these two regions are irrigated, including over 20% of Kherson’s farmland.

Flooded fields, toxic water

• Valuable perennial crops that relied on irrigation infrastructure fed by the reservoir will be flooded and then parched.
• Farther downstream, the lower Dnieper, Southern Bug and Inhulets river basins have been polluted, imperiling agriculture and drinking water for southern Ukraine.
• During the dam breach, 150 tons of oil leaked out, and at least 17 gas stations have been flooded.

After the flood, water shortages

• Most importantly, without water from the reservoir, the fields of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Crimea will dry out.
• Coastal towns on the Sea of Azov, most importantly Berdyansk, have lost their main source of drinking water.
• Without the Kakhovka Reservoir, however, Crimea is unlikely to receive irrigation water for at least a decade.

Fewer exports, higher prices

• Southern Ukraine’s sunflower seeds, soy and cereals are major ingredients for industrially processed foods and livestock feed.
• They provide the proteins and lipids that are the building blocks of the 21st-century diet.
• Global food commodity prices shot up hours after the dam broke, as global grain traders anticipated food commodity shortages.
• And so what we are going to see is a huge impact on global food security.”

An uncertain future

• Loss of the Kakhovka Dam is the latest blow to a region that has suffered heavily during the war.
• NASA satellite images show crops planted in 2022 that were never harvested.
• In 1941, Joseph Stalin ordered Soviet troops to destroy the predecessor of the Kakhovka Dam to slow the advancing German army.

• Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) want access to a location near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
• The IAEA is due to visit Ukraine and the Zaporizhzhia plant in the next week.
• The attack on the Nova Kakhovka dam in a Russian-occupied part of Ukraine unleashed flooding that devastated an area of about 600km², roughly the size of the city of Chicago.
• The attack, which is being blamed by many western analysts on Russia, happened a week before a scheduled visit of IAEA inspectors to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
• According to the IAEA, Zaporizhzhia – which is Europe’s largest nuclear power plant – now relies entirely on its sole remaining 750kv power line for off-site electricity.

Escalation logic

• The Russian army appears to be the benefactor in the short term as it scrambles to slow down Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
• This creates new levels of ambiguity in the war’s escalation logic.
• Escalation logic refers to the strategic decisions and actions taken to intensify a conflict, aiming to gain an advantage or deter the opponent.

Russian steps

• Russia’s war against Ukraine has followed a series of escalating steps.
• After the initial invasion, when the Russian offensive stalled in the summer of 2022, the Russian military chose to use cruelty against Ukrainian civilians.
• This escalation, however, negatively affected Russia’s economy and outlook as well, since the immediate and long-term forecasts do not look promising.

• Already there are reports that Ukrainian troops have established a bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River in the south.
• Russia has spent most of April trading lives and equipment for modest territorial gains around Bakhmut, leaving their forces exhausted.
• With time, Russia can solidify its hold on occupied territories and renovate its armed forces before reigniting the conflict on its terms.
• There is also the possibility that Putin anticipates that western support for Ukraine is not indefinite, and he needs only bide his time.

International support

• It may be the case that tanks and equipment from donor nations provide a decisive edge to the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
• There are hopes that this issue is at least partially resolved, though some shortages still exist, exacerbated by hard fighting throughout the winter.

The road south

• If may be that the push across the Dnipro in the southern Kherson region is a feint to distract from a major push in the north-east.
• The west wants reassurance that Ukraine can achieve a major military success, while Ukraine needs western arms and support to do so.
• With Russia eyeing a stalemate, a Ukrainian victory will send a powerful message – and, perhaps just as importantly, buy time.