Ruminations: Weaponizing Nature

"The Ukrainians are clearly being very creative in trying to make life very difficult for the Russians."
"It makes sense to slow down any rapid offensive."
Rob Lee, senior fellow, Foreign Policy Research Institute

“Everybody understands and nobody regrets it for a moment. We saved Kyiv!”
"It has been one of the strong sides, everybody has taken note of this."
Antonina Kostuchenko, retiree, Demydiv, Ukraine

"Our army, our military has very properly used engineering items, whether dams or bridges they blew up, and stopped the advance of forces. It was done everywhere in the first days, and it is happening now in the Donbas [in eastern Ukraine]."
"We wouldn’t have blown up our own bridges if the war hadn’t started. The cause is one and the same: aggression of the Russian Federation."
Oleksandr Kubrakov, Ukrainian military expert


Demydiv, Ukraine on April 6, 2022. Photo by Andre Luis Alves/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The decision was obviously one that must have made the residents of the small Ukrainian town gulp and think again. But it was taken and steps were made to bring it to reality. The plan to weaponize nature to foil the resolution of Moscow ordering its military to occupy the country's capital and destroy its government. Demydiv is a village just north of Kyiv. And it took a heroic leap of the imagination to create a situation that entirely hindered the Russian military from its mission.

With the general assent of the villagers, a deliberate action took place to flood the village, and with it a large expanse of fields and bogs surrounding the village. In so doing the Russian tank assault planned for Kyiv was thwarted. Which in turn gave the Ukrainian military the opportunity to prepare its defenses. "Everybody understands and nobody regrets it for a moment", Antonina Kostuchenko said, from her living room with its half-meter waterline up the wall. "We saved Kyiv!"

The Ukrainian village of Demydiv has about 750 households, of which roughly 50 were flooded.

Imaginatively creative temporary solutions to stall the Russian military advance aided the Ukrainian military in wreaking havoc on the invading forces. In so doing it also undertook to create havoc on its own territory; in some instances destroying infrastructure to slow down the Russian advance. Ukrainian troops had opened a dam nearby the village in this particular instance, a fast-thinking move that sent water surging into the countryside.

Throughout Ukraine where the situation called for extraordinary measures that at first glance might have been viewed as self-destructive, the military undertook to blow up bridges (some 300 thus far), bombed roads and disabled rail lines and airports, with the clear goal of channeling enemy troops into traps while forcing tank columns onto terrain less favourable to their mission's accomplishment. Moscow had itself while indignantly denying its troops were destroying Ukrainian infrastructure, complained that it was Ukrainian troops that were creating the chaos.

In some instances they were, and for a definable purpose. The Kremlin's frustration at its troops' inability to proceed with their mission, at the loss of armoured troop carriers, tanks, planes and helicopters to the Ukrainian military, and above all the deaths of so many generals and thousands of servicemen as a reflection of the fighting mettle and innovative new conflict measures to stop Russia's plans, has been indelible.


Credit: Sipa/AP

The village of Demydiv was flooded the day following the Russian military's invasion on February 24. Russia may have felt that the shock and trauma of its invasion and its planned lightning-advance would destroy any confidence the Ukrainian military might have had that it could somehow manage to challenge the Russian advance, but obviously they were dealing with a defensive mentality they had overlooked. That singular move to flood the approach to Kyiv created a sprawling, shallow lake for the Russian armoured column to try to negotiate.

Village residents managed to paddle about in rubber boats in an effort to live their lives as normally as imaginable despite the deep disturbances the flooding brought. Many among them felt their hardships were worth the efforts it caused them given the strategic benefits attained against Russian advances. Now, the village is faced with the need, with the departure of Russian troops and tanks, of reversing the flooding.

Russian shelling had damaged the dam, making the draining of the area more complicated than originally envisioned. Having played a pivotal role in the March fighting, enabling Ukrainian forces to repel Russian efforts to surround Kyiv, the strategy helped to drive the Russians into a retreat. The barrier created by the flooding ensured that tanks made no headway in their overall most immediate mission.

The Russian forces repeatedly attempted to cross the Irpin River, a tributary of the Dnipro, with the use of a pontoon bridge, driving across a marshy area. For their efforts they came under shelling and failed the crossings, leaving burned Russian tanks scattered on the river bank. Demydiv came out of the situation with six of its residents shot in a month of occupation, but it escaped the fate of having bodies left on the streets by retreating Russian soldiers, as occurred in Bucha.