>Russia claimed the Kramatorsk attack targeted the Ukrainian military and foreign mercenaries. The war crimes campaign group Truth Hounds spoke to witnesses who confirmed there were no military targets at the site.
> Britain is unwilling to apportion blame at this stage for the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine and is awaiting "all available facts", Foreign Secretary James Cleverly told AFP on Wednesday.
> "We're not going to say anything until we are completely armed with all the available facts. So we're going to err on the side of caution on this one," Cleverly said in an interview on the sidelines of a meeting at the OECD in Paris.
> He said that Russia bore ultimate responsibility for all events and destruction in the war, however, having initiated the conflict with its invasion in February last year.
> "It's clear that this event is a direct repercussion of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and there's nothing that Russia can do to hide that fact," he said.
>Finally, while this potentially has one benefit for the Ukrainians by cutting the fresh water canal to Crimea, the Ukrainians could have destroyed just the canal and prevented the Russians from rebuilding it without blowing the dam. We shall see in the fullness of time.
A destroyed canal can be fixed in no time. The canal was destroyed for eight years since 2014 and it was fixed very quickly when the Russians got access to the area.
>By the logic of co-transformation, we urged brutal free-market policies on Eastern Europe, and then imposed them on ourselves. Having participated in the creation of the Russian monster, we are now forced to become monsters to battle it, to manufacture and sell more weapons, to cheer the death of Russian soldiers, to spend more and more on defense, both here and in Europe, and to create the atmosphere and conditions of a second Cold War, because we failed to figure out how to secure the peace after the last one.
>The development of Russia in the post-Cold War period was not the result of a Western plot or Western actions. Russian officials chose, within a narrow range of options, how to behave, and they could have chosen differently. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022, was no more inevitable or foreordained than the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003. Still, it’s worth asking what other course we might have followed.