Did Russia Just Destroy a Dam to Thwart Ukraine's Counter Offensive?

The former US Ambassador to Ukraine thinks so.

In the early hours of Tuesday, June 6th a major dam on the Dnipro river in Russian occupied Ukraine suffered catastrophic damage. Floodwaters are now rushing downstream and sending tens of thousands of people fleeing, wreaking havoc across cities and farmlands, and disrupting drinking water supplies for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. Antonio Guterres called the dam’s destruction “a monumental humanitarian, economic and ecological catastrophe”

The Kakhovka dam was built over sixty years ago and forms a massive reservoir, roughly the size at the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Upstream, the dam provides water to prevent a meltdown at Europe’s largest Nuclear Power Plant. (The IAEA says there’s no immediate risk to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant — the cooling ponds are not rapidly depleting.)

Rather, it is downstream where this breach may have …