wanted to take you up on the "explicitly" then just googled it myself. in deed the additional protocol i of the geneva convention has something explicit to say about dams.
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"[...] the Nova Kakhovka dam has been earmarked as a potential target for [...] its strategic importance"
"Its destruction would have a number of significant repercussions [...] for Ukraine’s wider war effort."
"2. The special protection against attack provided for in paragraph 1 shall cease:
(a) for a dam or a dyke only if it is used for other than its normal function and in regular, significant and direct support of military operations and if such attack is the only feasible way to terminate such support;"
don't know whether or not this constraint applies. i'm anyway not really intending to justify this or russia's attack on ukraine in general. just don't like pointing out cruelty in wars as if it's a surprise this is happening. war is about killing more soldiers than your opponent and there never was a war not impacting civilians. many people seem to think: "i'm against war except if it's fought fair and without killing children, elderly, women, handicapped people and civilians in general."
I don't think that this constrain applies. The dam was part of the Russia-occupied territory or part of the gray zone. Ukraine was not using the damn dam for anything.
At this point I'm not willing to give Russia the benefit of the doubt anymore. Their leadership has more than sufficiently demonstrated that they consider atrocities and crimes of war as part of the toolbox, so to say.
The dam was under Russian control. Ukraine wouldn't have had any opportunity to place demolition charges.
Russia has demonstrated that it is;
- willing to level cities with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants
- willing to use torture, abduction, rape as systematic weapons of war
- willing to indiscriminately attack civilians
- willing to use banned weapons of war
Despite war crimes obviously (d'oh) happening on both sides of the conflict, the Russian leadership has made it evidently clear that is more than happy to unleash any amount of terror, pain, misery and suffering to get what it wants. The Russian leadership is perfectly a-ok to systematically use all of the aforementioned as weapons.
I've not seen this callousness from the Ukrainian leadership.
