Kakhovka Dam destruction (2023)

Night of June 5 to 6, 2023, Kherson oblast: the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro gives way and the 351 MW hydroelectric plant it carried is destroyed. Russian forces had held the structure since the first days of the invasion, in late February 2022. The reservoir empties downstream, dozens of towns flood on both banks, and the reservoir that fed irrigation in the south and the water intake of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant drops within days. Kyiv and its allies accuse Russia of blowing up the dam; Moscow denies it and blames Ukraine. No court has ruled to date. In October 2023, the joint assessment by the Ukrainian government and the United Nations put the event at 13.79 billion dollars, of which 2.79 billion in direct damage, the rest in losses, with the environment first. For an underwriter, the case reads in one line of the wording. The war exclusion in property policies (NMA 464 and its descendants) removes loss directly or indirectly occasioned by war, declared or not, and by warlike operations. The flood changes nothing: it is the effect, war is the proximate cause. And the question of who did it, which drives the whole cyber debate through state attribution, carries little weight here: whichever side set the charge, the structure sat on a front line. Any argument would turn on proof of the chain of causation, which falls on the insurer relying on the exclusion. What remains insurable goes through a standalone political violence policy with war cover, which downstream residents rarely buy, and through public reconstruction schemes. On the energy side, the case mostly feeds accumulation work: a dam in a conflict zone exposes in one stroke the structure, the insureds downstream and the industrial users that lived off its water.

• United Nations in Ukraine, press release on the post-disaster needs assessment after the Kakhovka Dam destruction, October 17, 2023