Ukraine War Day #403: Russia Pumps Water, Ukraine Blows Smoke

Dear Readers:

Here we have a fable of differing mentalities. Let us call it The Fable of the Beaver And the Unicorn. In this story we will meet two men. One of them is a Beaver, the other is a Unicorn.

“I build.”

“I dream.”

I start with some good news about the H2O situation in Donbass. Readers may be aware that the Donbass residents have suffered stoically and endured for many years a man-made drought, caused by the Ukrainians cutting off their water. In fact, one of the main causes of this war was the fight for water. One of the very first things the Russian army did, practically the first day of the war, was to unblock the Seversky Donets (literally “Northern Little Don”) canal which feeds the Donbass with fresh water.

An important waterway connects Rostov to the Donbass.

Now there is a new technological development in this water saga: The Russian government has built the first floating pumping station on the vast waterway that connects the Rostov Oblast of Russia, with the Donbass, via the Seversky Donets Canal. A man named Alexei Leonov heads the project; he works for the Army Engineers of the Russian Ministry of Defense: “The heart started beating,” Leonov announced on March 31. In my parable, Leonov is the Beaver.

Alexei Leonov: “The heart started beating…”

This short video from Donbass Devushka shows the pumping station in action. The man in the hard hat, I believe is Alexei Leonov. It’s hard to google him for a photograph, because he shares the same name as a famous Soviet cosmonaut!

Anyhow, Leonov goes on to say that the project will proceed in several stages. The main complex consists of two branches 200 km each; and 7 pumping stations. “Water will be funneled into supplementary reservoirs; then water-processing and cleaning plants will be set up. The entire waterway will extend from the territory of the Rostov Oblast in Russia, to the Seversky Donets Canal in the Donbass.”

More than 3,500 workers are taking part in this construction. The volume will consist of up to 300,000 cubic meters of water daily.

Albert Kangiev

Not just the Donbass, but also Crimea will benefit from this abundance. One of the untold stories of this war is that the Crimean peninsula, surrounded by salt water, almost came to the point of dying a slow agonizing death, from lack of fresh water. Like Donbass, Crimea was also cut off from water, for many years, by spiteful Ukrainian Nationalists. It got to the point where Russian officials were so desperate, they almost decided to build vast (and expensive) de-salinization plants. But then the war came along, and helped to solve this issue.

Deputy Head of Water Affairs for the peninsula, Albert Kangiev, had reporter earlier that, starting in April [which is now] some water will be released from the Severo-Krym Canal in the Kherson Oblast, and allowed to flow into Crimea. Even while the war is raging, Russian engineers have been busy: Twenty-eight pumping stations have been repaired, and over 350 km of waterways have been restored. In some places, channels made of concrete had to be reinforced.

Object #6

Some people build stuff. Others just destroy. And what they can’t destroy physically, they fantasize about destroying. A lot of the “Ukrainian National Project” consists of mere fantasy. People with too much time on their hands, instead of picking up a shovel or a hammer and try to build something, they pass meaningless laws trying to control, on paper, what they cannot actually control in the physical world. In their heads they write ALT-History fantasy fan-fiction, in which their team wins all the wars and tortures to death every last person from the other side. It’s a kind of mental illness…

And so we learn, and this wasn’t even on April Fool’s Day, but a day later, that the Ukrainian government wants to rename the Hero City of Sebastopol to the more mundane-sounding “Object #6”.

Monument to Sunken Ships

Alexei Danilov of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense proposed the working name of Object #6 until the Supreme Rada can assign a real new name, preferably something like Akhtiar. The point is, that Sebastopol must be renamed as soon as possible, according to this moron. He is anxious to break the historical associations which connect this city to Russian history. [yalensis: which is dumb, because “Sebastopol” is actually a Greek name.] Danilov also wants to remove the famous landmark Monument to Sunken Ships, which dominates the port and has become the very symbol of the city.

The monument was erected in 1905 on the 50th anniversary of the Siege of Sebastopol , which took place during the Crimean War. In the famous naval battles, many ships of the Russian Imperial Black Sea Fleet had to be scuttled; and this monument commemorates those losses. In 1969, in Soviet times, the monument was included in the coat of arms of Sebastopol . And in 2015 the image appeared on the obverse of the 100 commemorative banknote of the Russian ruble dedicated to “the accession of the Republic of Crimea to the Russian Federation and formation of new constituent entities – the Republic of Crimea and the federal city of Sebastopol”.

Given this history, and the association of the monument with both Russian and Soviet history, it is “understandable” why the Ukrainian Nationalists want to blow it up and replace it “with some other meaningful symbol”, in Danilov’s words. [Probably a statue of Bandera?]

Of course, in order to accomplish all these good things, the Kiev regime has to conquer Crimea/Sebastopol first. If I were them, I would concentrate on that: One step at a time. It’s like that old joke about the Theoretical Physicist stranded on a deserted island with a crate of tinned food, but no can opener. His solution? “Stipulate a can opener.”

First, according to Danilov, the victorious Ukrainians will cut off all infrastructure ties between the peninsula and the Russian mainland. Next they will engage in heightened “ideological” work on the Crimean inhabitants. To win them over to the Ukrainian point of view and “detoxify” them from their current belief system. [yalensis: Well, Danilov is being kind here; I have read other Ukrainian Nationalists who say they just want to kill or expel the existing inhabitants. Much less work for the lazy!]

The removal of the Kerch-Crimea Bridge: Well, that just goes without saying. The Bridge must go. And then some vague nonsense about removal of the bridge leading to “freedom of navigation”, and this has some connection to the reparations that Russia may pay to Ukraine after the latter wins the war…. (?) This unicorn likes to dream…