Why Russia blew up the Kakhovka dam

When I first heard that the Russians had blown up the Kakhovka dam, I assumed that this was an effective tactic to frustrate the Ukrainian counteroffensive. It will surely slow it. But a Ukrainian friend raises an additional possibility – that these are the scorched-earth tactics the Germans used in much the same places 80 years ago. Writing from Kyiv, she quotes a letter from Himmler to the SS commander in Ukraine in September 1943: ‘It is necessary to make sure that when retreating from Ukraine, not a single person, not a single animal, not a single gram of grain, not a single metre of railway track is there, so that not a single house survives… The enemy must be a totally burned and devastated country.’ She thinks Putin’s only tactic is to ‘make Ukraine unliveable in order to force an end to resistance’. This is a shockingly believable thought.