They flooded their own village and kept the Russians at bay
DEMYDIV, UKRAINE » They pull up soggy linoleum from their floors, and fish potatoes and jars of pickles from submerged cellars. They hang out waterlogged rugs to dry in the pale spring sunshine.
All around Demydiv, a village north of Kyiv, Ukraine, residents have been grappling with the aftermath of a severe flood, which under ordinary circumstances would have been yet another misfortune for a people under attack by Russia.
This time, though, it was a tactical victory. The Ukrainians flooded the village intentionally, along with a vast expanse of fields and bogs around it, creating a quagmire that thwarted a Russian tank assault on Kyiv and bought the army precious time to prepare defenses.
The residents of Demydiv paid the price in the rivers of dank green floodwater that engulfed many of their homes. And they could not be more pleased.
“Everybody understands and nobody regrets it for a moment,” said Antonina Kostuchenko, a retiree, whose living room is now a musty space with waterlines a foot or so up the walls.
“We saved Kyiv!” she said with pride.
What happened in Demydiv was not an outlier. Since the war’s early days, Ukraine has been swift and effective in wreaking havoc on its own territory, often by destroying infrastructure, as a way to foil a Russian army with superior numbers and weaponry.
Demydiv was flooded when troops opened a nearby dam and sent water surging into the countryside. Elsewhere in Ukraine, the military has, without hesitation, blown up bridges, bombed roads and disabled rail lines and airports. The goal has been to slow Russian advances, channel enemy troops into traps and force tank columns onto less favorable terrain.
So far, more than 300 bridges have been destroyed across Ukraine, the country’s minister of infrastructure, Oleksandr Kubrakov, said. When the Russians tried to take a key airport outside Kyiv on the first day of the invasion, Ukrainian forces shelled the runway, leaving them pockmarked with craters and unable to receive planeloads of Russian special forces.
The scorched-earth policy played an important role in Ukraine’s success in holding off Russian forces in the north and preventing them from capturing Kyiv, the capital, military experts said. “The Ukrainians are clearly being very creative in trying to make life very difficult for the Russians,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “It makes sense to slow down any rapid offensive.”
One approach, used often around Kyiv last month and in recent days in the pitched combat in eastern Ukraine, is to force the Russians to attempt pontoon river crossings around destroyed bridges. Those sites are carefully plotted in advance by Ukrainian artillery teams, turning the pontoon bridgework into bloody, costly affairs for the Russians.
To the east of Kyiv, bridges were blown up in a manner that forced a squad of Russian tanks into a peat bog; four tanks sank nearly up to their turrets.
The strategy comes at an enormous cost to the country’s civilian infrastructure. The Russian army, too, has been blowing up bridges and targeting railroad stations, airports, fuel depots and other facilities and ballooning the price tag for rebuilding the country after the war.
The estimated total damage to transportation infrastructure after two months of war is about $85 billion, the Ukrainian government has said.