Before the dam explosion, residents of the Kherson region in southeastern Ukraine referred to the local reservoir simply as the “sea.”
Now, just one year after the June 6, 2023, attack on the Kakhovka Dam, they call it the “dead sea.” Once vast, its water irrigated farms and kept hundreds of thousands of people hydrated. It was replete with fish that had provided sustenance to the local population for generations.
The attack, which was carried out by Russian occupying forces, sent contaminated floodwaters measuring trillions of gallons into the Black Sea. It was the worst blow to the environment in a war that has ravaged Ukraine’s ecology and is considered one of the worst human-caused natural disasters of all time.
Since October, a Ukrainian team of prosecutors, ecologists and scientists has been regularly testing the area as part of efforts to build a case against Russia and charge its aggressor with ecocide. Kyiv wants this added to the list of international crimes recognized by the International Criminal Court (ICC), along with genocide, crimes against humanity, aggression and war crimes.
That same month, I accompanied a small team of investigators to Kherson, which Ukraine regained from Russian occupation in 2022. The fighting was ongoing, and on the outskirts you could still hear the “bang-bang-bang,” followed by an ominous quiet when not even birds made a sound.
As our armored car crawled up to one of the checkpoints, we showed our entry documents issued by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). With me in the vehicle were Vladyslav Ignatenko, a prosecutor specializing in environmental protection, and Oleh Kaidashov, a local ecologist from the State Environmental Inspectorate. They were on their way to pick up soil samples for the laboratory research requested by the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine.
We were headed toward the city’s most dangerous point, a mere 2 miles from the Russian military base on the left bank of the Dnieper River. Named Karantynnyi Ostriv (Quarantine Island in English) after the sailors in the 18th century who were placed there when coming from abroad, it later became a city resort. Nowadays it is an industrial district with multistory buildings, dry docks and a large oil terminal. When the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant was destroyed, Ostriv and Kherson, located on the river’s right bank, were flooded along with nearby villages.
“Each sample-taking trip could be the last,” Kaidashov told New Lines while the soldiers checked our documents. “The Island is usually attacked with Grads. Russians sometimes drive a tank to the bank and fire from there.”
The three of us inside the vehicle were wearing body armor. Kaidashov listened carefully but did not hear any gunshots. We had been told that the air raid sirens only sound when there are potential air strikes or incoming missiles. But artillery shelling happens too quickly, and it is impossible to warn in advance.
This was Kaidashov’s first visit to Karantynnyi Ostriv. In the following months, he would regularly return to collect water samples from rivers and ponds, checking them for toxins and diseases. The floodwaters contained heavy metals and nutrients that had built up in the dam’s sediments.
Soil samples were sent to Kyiv for a large investigation in a state-run modern laboratory. In the space of only a few days, Kaidashov needed to collect soil from over 40 places near Ostriv and within Kherson. The prosecutor general had provided coordinates of the locations to sample. They were mostly the coordinates of former storage facilities for petroleum and engine oil, sewage treatment plants, sports grounds and kindergarten yards.
The car stopped in front of the Koshova River, which separates Ostriv from the rest of Kherson. Kaidashov jumped into the ravine with a shovel in one hand and a phone showing him the coordinates in the other. The prosecutor jumped in after him. The driver did not turn off the engine. If there was an attack, everyone needed to be able to get to the nearest shelter as soon as possible — though, unfortunately, there weren’t any bomb shelters in Ostriv, and that grim reality was not lost on us.
The men marked five holes and took soil from each, first clearing it of plants and stones. Then they packed the samples in airtight bags inscribed with the words: “National Police of Ukraine.”
“We take 3 kilograms [6.6 pounds] of soil from each coordinate. One hundred twenty kilograms [265 pounds] of Kherson land will be sent to a Kyiv laboratory,” Kaidashov said. He pointed to traces of fuel oil still visible on the wall of a high-rise building, showing how contaminated water reached the third floor during the floods. The surface of the water was still covered with oil.
How the samples make their way to Kyiv is kept confidential for security reasons. Once they are in the lab, each bag is anonymized with a code so that the analysts are also kept in the dark as to its origin. Oksana Samkova, the deputy director for specialized activities who has worked in the laboratory for 20 years, said this is to eliminate any potential bias.
Over the next two months, the soil was tested for 350 contaminants, including toxic compounds, heavy metals or pathogens. Earlier this year, the results were handed over to the prosecutor general. Since this is evidence for a criminal investigation, the results are yet to be announced, and a trial date has not yet been set.
In May a bomb exploded near the laboratory in Kyiv, pausing all testing of the samples.
The water that Kakhovka kept was about half the amount in Lake Mead in the United States, the reservoir formed by the Hoover Dam. A forest has since taken its place, a remarkable testament to nature’s ability to heal. But the damage is immense: According to the Wilson Center, a U.S. research institute, the attack on the dam rendered unusable more than 3,800 square miles of land in Ukraine’s southern regions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk for the next few years because of the lack of water supply. Whole villages disappeared under water, flooding an area of what was home to more than 100,000 people.
In the first days of the flooding, prosecutors from the ICC came to Kherson to see the scale of the disaster for themselves. Shortly afterward, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that The Hague-based court had begun its own investigation into the tragedy. “It is very important that representatives of international justice saw firsthand the consequences of this Russian terrorist attack and heard for themselves that Russian terror continues,” he said in a televised public address.
Ukraine is now home to the ICC’s largest field office outside of The Hague, according to Maksym Popov, an adviser to the prosecutor general of Ukraine focused on environmental issues. Since Russia began its full-scale invasion in February 2022, thousands of Ukrainian investigators have documented tens of thousands of war crimes in the country, in a sprawling effort involving experts from the United States, the U.K. and Europe. They range from the willful killing of civilians, rape, torture and the forced deportation of children. For the Kakhovka Dam case alone, there are more than 400 Ukrainian investigators and prosecutors working on it.
Early in the war, the Ukrainian government recognized the destruction of the environment, differentiating it from other global conflicts. Zelenskyy has included environmental protection in his 10-point peace plan.
And while the prosecutor general’s office will not disclose details of the ongoing Kakhovka Dam investigation, it has enlisted the help of dozens of specialists and scientists who have already registered land mines in forests, contaminated water and loss of biodiversity across huge swathes of the country.
“We no longer want nature to be a silent victim in this war,” Popov said.
In the areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, they took soil, water and hair samples from the local population to check whether they contained heavy metals, he said. Ukrainian laboratories were not capable of conducting all the required research, so the prosecutor general looked for laboratories abroad. The office also contacted Turkey and Bulgaria with a proposal to investigate how the Black Sea was affected.
International humanitarian law already protects dams and nuclear power plants from attack and considers their destruction a war crime. And while Ukraine has long had the crime of ecocide as part of its legal code, it is hoping this will expand to the global level.
Popov said that the investigation may last for many years, and some of the trials may take place in Ukrainian courts and in other countries on the principle of universal jurisdiction. Ukraine is also counting on the ICC’s Rome Statute, hoping that if ecocide is not incorporated into it, the lesser version of “long-term and severe damage to the natural environment,” which already falls under war crimes, will apply to the Kakhovka Dam explosion.
“For the first time in world history, Ukraine is trying to activate the norms of international humanitarian law dedicated to protecting the environment,” Popov said. “We are setting a precedent not so much for ourselves as for the world.”
When the states that have signed the Rome Statute met for their annual assembly in December last year, at their 22nd session in New York, much of the talk focused on Ukraine. “There was no doubt among the participants,” said Volodymyr Hryshko, a lawyer at the Ukrainian civic organization Truth Hounds, which has been documenting war crimes in Ukraine since 2014. “[They asked] If the Kakhovka Dam destruction was not an ecocide, then what is?”
International experts have concurred with Ukraine’s assessment that Russia deliberately blew up the plant. In June, as Ukraine commemorated one year since the attack, the prosecutor general named the Russian general who gave the order to blow up the plant: Oleg Makarevich, the commanding officer of the “Dnepr” Russian unit that controlled this territory. He is 61 years old, with combat experience in Chechnya and Syria. He was also in charge of Russian troops in southern Ukraine throughout most of last year. Last October, a few months after the dam’s explosion, he left his post and is now retired and living in Russia. Moscow has blamed Kyiv for the dam’s destruction.
The United Nations Environment Programme, in an October 2023 report, stated that just before the dam’s destruction, the water level was at 57 feet, the highest in 30 years of observation. The series of explosions at the dam occurred at approximately 3 a.m. on that fateful day. The explosions were registered by both Ukraine’s and Romania’s seismographs. Part of the dam was destroyed as a result. The flooding destroyed the rest, and the water spewed forward at a rate of 9 miles per hour.
The Ukrainian rescue workers and soldiers could only help the residents of the right bank of the Dnieper, where thousands were evacuated and dozens were left dead or missing. But the worst damage was on the left bank of the river, which was controlled by the Russian army. We do not know much about what happened there: Neither Ukrainian rescuers nor international humanitarian mission representatives have had access to the area.
Popov said the other names of the Russian soldiers who took part in the destruction would be revealed eventually, as will the names of those who planned it. The decision to destroy such a huge dam could only have been made at the level of Russian leadership, he said.
Popov did not know whether Russia would conduct its own investigation. One week before the explosion, the Russian government adopted a resolution prohibiting internal investigations of accidents at hydrotechnical structures “occurring as a result of military actions, sabotage and acts of terrorism.” When the Kakhovka Dam erupted, the Russian military blew up two more dams in the Donetsk region.
“The areas of those dams are only a fraction of the size of the Kakhovka reservoir, hence why the consequences weren’t as tragic,” Popov explained.
Popov said that Ukrainian and Western dam design and operation engineers confirmed that the explosion occurred in the middle of the dam. It was impossible to destroy such a dam from the outside with missiles.
Popov recalled that even six months before the disaster, the Russians announced several times that the Kakhovka Dam could be destroyed, claiming that the Ukrainian military would carry it out. Popov admitted that, prior to the Russian attack, he didn’t consider those statements to be real plans. He was more concerned about Russia’s potential use of nuclear weapons or whether they would provoke an accident at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which the Russian military seized in March 2022. So when Popov received the call on the morning of June 6, 2023, and told news of the dam, he was shocked.
For about the first five decades of the Soviet Union’s existence, from the 1920s to the 1970s, a cascade of six dams was built on Ukraine’s largest river, the Dnieper, from Kyiv to Kherson. This construction of dams led to the first ecological disaster: forests, fields and villages were flooded. Most sturgeon species, which could not swim through the Kakhovka dams for spawning, disappeared from the Dnieper River.
What the dams did provide, however, was a new source of electricity. Nuclear power plants emerged all around Ukraine in the 1970s and began producing it. Large industrial cities arose.
The Kakhovka power plant, one of the largest in Europe, was built in 1956. The dam hydrated the steppe and the arid southern region of Ukraine. Europe’s longest canal system, the 250-mile-long Pivnich Krymskiy, connecting the Kakhovka Dam with Crimea, was fed by it.
Since the dam was built in Soviet times, the project’s paperwork must be stored somewhere in Russian archives, Popov added. Those who planned and trained for the destruction of the dam must have understood the scale of the disaster.
“The dam destruction led to disaster,” ecologist Maksym Soroka explained. He lives in Zaporizhzhia, and together with other ecologists had been studying the consequences of the Kakhovka Dam destruction for his region.
Soroka said that during the flooding, the sediment that had been accumulating for 70 years rose from the bottom of the reservoir. Chemical plants and oil warehouses were flooded. Dangerous substances were carried away by water for hundreds of miles and polluted the land.
When the dam exploded, Kaidashov did not hear it but was awakened by a call from his son in the early hours. “I woke up my wife and my father. We started filling up buckets and barrels with water. Most often, during floods, the lack of clean drinking water is the biggest problem,” he recalled.
Later that morning, Kaidashov and his father went to the riverside to watch the water coming. But then the shelling began. Kaidashov felt an attack from the Russia-occupied left bank. He saw exploding missiles surrounding the rescue boats. “When the water arrived in Kherson, it stopped just a couple of streets down.”
The environmental inspectorate where Kaidashov worked did not stop operating during the disaster. They took water samples several times each day, checking them for pathogens and toxic substances. Kaidashov recalled a sense of devastation that befell him, as he wondered to himself what worse calamity could happen to his hometown. “A nuclear strike maybe?” he said.
Kaidashov was born and raised in Kherson in a family of sailors and has been an environmental inspector almost his entire adult life. During the full-scale invasion, Kaidashov, his wife and their two sons stayed in Kherson, hoping that the world would stop the Russian invasion and spare Kherson from Russian occupation. But the Russian army entered the city on March 1, 2022, and stayed for eight months.
“Had we known what was to happen, we would have insisted on taking the children out,” Kaidashov said.
In June 2022, the Russian army arrested Kaidashov’s sons, then aged 20 and 28. They were held in the largest and most violent torture chamber in Kherson, subjected to electric torture and beatings. Tearful and shaking, Kaidashov described how his sons’ captors also burned them with cigarettes and threatened to shoot them, forcing them to strip naked under threat of rape. His boys were accused of sabotage, he said, but they refused to give the confession demanded from them, and they were eventually released. He asked us not to talk to his wife, Tetiana, about this because she still has not recovered. The young men left Kherson, first to occupied Crimea, then Georgia, before heading farther west to an undisclosed location, for their safety.
Ukraine’s armed forces liberated Kherson in November 2022, but the Russian army retreated to the left bank and from there continued to attack the right bank. One of the first and most tragic attacks on Kherson was before New Year’s Eve that year, when Grad missiles struck near a produce market, killing 10 people. Tetiana saw it happen but managed to run underground before one of the Grads struck the apartment. She and Kaidashov now live with Kaidashov’s father in a basement, a small and decrepit property that they have outfitted with a kitchen, beds and a living room.
“The city is under fire, day and night, so we live underground,” Kaidashov explained. “Between sunrise and 3 p.m., people are in the streets, the shops are open. But after that, especially in winter when it gets dark early, the city freezes. There are no streetlights or lights in people’s windows.”
The flooding also deprived Kaidashov of his summer house, which his father bought some 50 years ago. For the family, it was a place to rest and renew their strength. Tetiana grew flowers there for more than 20 years. On her cell phone, she showed us photos of her blooms, a gallery full of roses and lilies.
To this day, the couple does not know what happened to the house during the flooding. The territory is occupied. If he zooms in on Google Maps, it appears the house is still intact. All they know is that the flooding lifted their neighbors’ houses off their foundations and carried them into the open sea.
Tetiana says that even if the land where her summer house was liberated today, she would be cautious about growing vegetables and trees or restoring the vineyard: The water poisoned the soil with toxic particles, she explained. Animals and fish died, and oil was spilled.
The bottom of the reservoir is now covered with trees and bushes; a forest has appeared in less than a year. This is primarily because of the high amount of phosphorus and nitrogen, which, in essence, are fertilizers. A great deal of ragweed has also appeared, a dangerous indigenous plant that can cause asthma. It is impossible to control its reproduction when it is growing at the bottom of a body of water. The former reservoir, as well as the Dnieper River of the Kherson region, are now considered front lines in the ongoing war. Residents of coastal villages and towns are not allowed to come near the waterfront because Russian drones are constantly spotted there, and daily shelling prevents ecologists from taking soil and water samples. Some areas cannot be explored even one year after the flooding. In May, three aerial bombs fell in the center of Kherson, damaging the office of the State Environmental Inspectorate, where Kaidashov worked, temporarily halting the research.
Recently, Kaidashov and his wife took a trip to see their sons for the first time in a year and a half.
“We spent three weeks with our sons, calmed our nerves and returned to Kherson to continue working.”
This story was produced in partnership with The Reckoning Project.
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