The aral sea's destruction can be placed solely on the post-soviet kazakhstani government which sold off land and water rights to a small group of farmers (kulaks) who using the water management systems the soviets so graciously built for them to drain the 4th largest lake in the world in under a decade, way to go kazakhstan! They don't want to refill the lake, they could open up the tributaries any day now but they won't because it and the remaining lake water is more valuable for its agricultural uses, the soviets did not irrigate as intensely as the kazakhstanis did and if the ussr never collapsed we wouldn't have seen the lake get to this level. Now though it's entirely unfixable, it will always be two separate lakes in the best case scenario, worst case scenario the caspian is next.