Evidence suggests Russia blew Kakhovka dam in Ukraine - New York Times
Evidence suggests Russia blew Kakhovka dam in Ukraine - New York Times
Evidence suggests this month's destruction of the huge Kakhovka dam in a Russian-controlled area of Ukraine resulted from an inside explosion set off by Russia, the New York Times said.
Cited NYT article here for those who have access and would like more details: An Inside Job https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/16/world/europe/ukraine-kakhovka-dam-collapse.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
Yeah I'm going to need more than "trust me bro".
Not trying to Iraq WMDs 2.0
The Reuters article is a little light on what's included. Wanted to post a free article anyone could access. Lots of good information, multiple lines of evidence, and interesting soviet history of the dam in the actual article Reuters is citing.
The argument offered by the article for the "Did Russia or Ukraine do it?" question is literally no better than "trust me bro, they had the plans, don't worry about the motive."
We all know they did, but being able to prove it is paramount.
This is an obnoxious bait-and-switch. They make a false dichotomy out of "Either Russia did it or it was an accident" and then correctly disprove it being an accident while not establishing any particular reason beyond Russia also having the plans for the dam to establish it was Russia who did it in their own held territory and not Ukraine. It's exactly as miserable a level of journalism as one has come to expect of the NYT.
Incidentally, here's an article from a few months ago about the Ukrainian military's contingency to blow up the dam and seemingly already inflicting a little bit of damage to test being able to destroy it more completely. Does this prove that Ukraine did it? Of course not, but there is a burden of proof to establishing one side probably did it and OP's article does not even conceive of reaching that burden of proof in the case of Russia being the culprit.
As you said this is par for the course for the NYT foreign affairs reporting which has never opposed a war especially not during the lead up to that war.
I'm not a deep state conspiracy theorist in fact I'm not even right wing, but you can't help but wonder if the numerous links between CIA, FBI, and 'intelligence officers' with mass media isn't at fault.