KNOW NOW:
ZAPORIZHZHIA!
Mother Earth in the Balance
This is Zaporizhzhia, midway along the vast front line where Ukrainians fight to regain their ground. We’ve replaced K/NOW’s customary image with this immersive oil on canvas by Kyiv-based painter Yaroslav Leonets. He depicts what the camera can no longer capture: a lone cyclist in repose, overlooking an undisturbed landscape. The vista, like so many Leonets memorialized, has since been destroyed.
Nearly one fifth of Ukraine is still under Russian control; this region or oblast along the Dnipro River is midway on its July 2023 border with its Russian occupiers. It may be the most treacherous ground in Ukraine’s one month old counter-offensive. Thirty days ago, Putin blew up the Kakhovka dam and drained the country’s largest reservoir essential to the environment, hydration, power, and safety of a vast area. The attack put at risk the cooling water for the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest. A meltdown here would be exponentially more disastrous than Chernobyl. No one has any idea just how bad.
“The Bicyclist” is part of a memorial landscape series Leonets painted through the early days of Russia’s invasion. The artist wants us to remember his country’s natural panoramas before they became deadly war zones. But what was beauty is now beastly, and the painter’s recent memory of a place once bucolic belies today’s picture of a land overrun by heavy tanks, artillery and mines. Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky calls Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attacks here “brutal ecocide” and issued an all points bulletin to Ukrainians about the risks of leakage, imploring the international community to pay attention.
He and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are trading assessments of just how present the danger is: Ukraine intel shows Russia’s military, which has controlled the plant since last September, has laid explosives, a claim that the IAEA so far qualifies by saying they are not in critically strategic locations that can cripple the plant’s functions. An online full “service portal” for Ukrainians claims the explosives are in the plant’s turbine hall, near its power units, the vast surrounding industrial zone, and even the spillway structures connecting the cooler and reactors. It preps the public for a possible meltdown by offering detailed directions on handling contaminated clothing, physical space, and one another.
Russians have deployed military equipment, missile systems and heavy weapons around the perimeter of the plant. The “weaponization of Zaporizhzhia is entirely novel” says Amy J. Nelson, David M. Rubenstein fellow at the Brookings Institution. Looking at the looming nuclear catastrophe, she adds “Never has a nuclear power plant been used as a nuclear shield (manipulated to protect Russian troops and military hardware), and never has a country threatened to co-opt a plant by siphoning power back into its own grid.” This, while each side negates the other’s ownership of the plant, and Russia characteristically turns the charge on Ukraine, blaming it for threatening to blast the nuclear facility.
At a Dialogue examining Russia’s attack on Ukraine as an attack on democracy, Ukraine’s former finance minister and leading booster, Natalie Jaresko, allows Putin to make her argument for continued US engagement. “This is as much a war against Ukraine and the Ukrainian people - it's a genocide – as part of his intention is to destroy the people -- but it's as well to destroy the liberal order that's enabled the United States to be the superpower that it is. And the fact that he's aligning himself with other autocrats who have disdain for that order - whether it be North Korea, Iran, or to some extent, China - tells us that this is about that entire system, not just about Ukraine.”
Looking around the gallery where Leonet’s work is exhibited, Jaresko says the “extraordinary juxtaposition” to current life triggers her own memory. “I know these places, and the light in these paintings - different light, morning light, afternoon, golden autumn light - the light in these paintings made me remember how incredibly beautiful Ukraine is, even though I have all these dark pictures in my head.”
Her Dialogue partner, James Steinberg, former top official at the State Department and White House and current Dean of Johns Hopkins School of Advance International Service (SAIS) recognizes “it's a fight for the soul of America that's been a long standing one and while it's contentious…hopefully this will continue…the balance in favor, and supportive of the challenge that the Ukrainian people are facing. And a fair enough understanding both in Congress and the American public to stay the course for this.”
The stakes are far too high for the world’s active interest to wane while the clear risks escalate, Steinberg warns. Instead, he implores us to “remind people why this is so important. It's not just an act of charity. As important as it is for us to show solidarity for the people of Ukraine… this is about us every bit as much as it is about the people of Ukraine.”
DO NOW:
For an immediate, up to date look at Ukraine’s counter-offensive and Russian occupation, the Institute for the Study of War has this interactive map. To grasp the war’s environmental devastation, examine what the OECD says is ahead for Mother Earth. So much of Ukraine’s topography has changed. Sights for sore eyes can be found here with Kyiv-based Yarolsav Leonets’ entire exhibition, including storyboards with his statements. For a robust conversation about the risks and responsibilities worldwide, watch/hear our latest Dialogue, available here.
Amy Kaslow