Russia's Scorched Earth Policy in Ukraine: A Trip to the Dried-Up Kakhovka Reservoir

There's a Soviet motion picture about the Kakhovka Reservoir that is almost as old as the lake itself. Called "Poem about the Sea ," the 1958 film is a paean to socialism and its desire to remodel nature with dams, canals and power plants. The "sea" referred to in the title is manmade, a monumental encroachment on the environment. Its water is to transform the arid steppe into fecund farmland. The fact that the reservoir is also going to swallow the homes and orchards belonging to Ukrainian farmers does not go unmentioned in the film.

In what is perhaps the film’s best-known scene, one of the characters begins chopping down the beloved pear tree in front of his family home. "Shouldn’t we switch over to atomic energy?" an older neighbor asks in desperation. It’s not about electricity, the film’s hero responds, it’s about irrigating the entire south. "Forget our pears and huts. The time has come. We’re deciding our land’s future for 1,000 years ahead."

At the very end of the film, a number of people gather silently on the shores of the sea – gazing out at the endless expanse of water that they will first have to become accustomed to.

Since then, three generations have lived with the Kakhovka Reservoir. Now it is gone. The Russian occupiers apparently blew up the dam on June 6, unleashing an enormous flood. A body of water four times the size of Germany’s Lake Constance emptied out within just a few weeks.

What does the catastrophe mean for the people who live on what used to be the shores of the reservoir? What future do they have? In the search for answers, we made two trips to the Kakhovka Reservoir, from Malokaterynivka at its easternmost extremity, to Beryslav in the far west, more than 200 kilometers (124 miles) away. The first visit took place in June, right after the water had disappeared, and the second came in August, when the lakebed was green with new vegetation. Both nature and humanity are in the process of adapting to the new conditions. Humanity is finding it more difficult. Meanwhile, the war continues to rage on the banks of the former lake.

The Stench of Rotting Clams

On a hot day in June, Inna, 52, is standing in front of her family home in Malokaterynivka. The house used to have a view of the lake, with Inna’s father having received the property as an employee of the railway that runs along the shoreline. But now, where an expanse of blue used to stretch out to the horizon, there is only brown mud, drying and cracking in the sun. It's a bleak sight. "How horrible the stench was yesterday, like rotting clams and fish! You could hardly breathe," says Inna.

The Dnieper River, which swelled to form the reservoir, can barely be seen from her house now, having returned to its old bed far in the distance. Down on what used to be the lakeshore, dried-out clams crunch underfoot. Every few meters, you can see desiccated water snakes that have tried to escape from the empty lake into the shady gardens. It looks as if the village has been beset by a Biblical plague.

"At first, we thought the water would only drop by two or three meters, just like last winter when the level of the reservoir receded. But then, it disappeared entirely," says Inna. As she speaks, a siren begins howling in the background. It's another air-raid warning. Just a few kilometers away is the front line, where the Ukrainians launched their counteroffensive in June.

The front also cuts through Inna’s life. When she looks to the west, where there used to be glorious sunsets over the lake, she can seen Enerhodar in the distance, where she lived before the war began. The city is now under Russian occupation, along with the vast Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, where Inna’s husband and son used to work.

Inna moved back to her home village to take care of a niece and a nephew, but her husband and daughter still live in Enehodar, nearby yet so far away. Inna is confident that Enehodar will be liberated, but what will happen to the nuclear station? "The power plant is in a coma," she jokes, the reactors having been shut down. But the Russians have mined both the compound and the cooling pond. "And with the Russians, nothing ever goes according to plan. Who knows, maybe they blew up the Kakhovka Dam out of stupidity," she says.

And what about Inna’s future, even if Ukraine does manage to regain control of Enerhodar? Will there be enough children for the kindergarten where she works? How can the nuclear power plant be switched on again without the water from the reservoir to cool it? Everything is up in the air. When the winds pick up in the autumn, will they bring sandstorms to Malokaterynivka instead of waves?

In August, two months after the visit, Inna sends photos: The brown expanse in front of her home has turned green. In one spot, spring water is pushing its way out of the sandy ground. The neighbors, she writes, have given up on their gardens for a lack of water. But at least the lakebed is not as ugly as it was, and the vegetation keeps the topsoil from blowing away.

As it happens, the worst fears of the experts have not come to pass. Many thought that the mud at the bottom of the lake posed significant dangers, fearing that wind could kick up heavy metals and radionuclides. But the Kakhovka Reservoir did not turn into a desert.

Paprika Instead of Fish

For many residents, however, that is cold comfort.

It is August when Mykola Shostak shows us the cove where he learned to swim as a child and where he caught fish right up to June. Shostak lives in Osokorivka, on the Ukrainian-controlled right bank of the reservoir. The village was once known for its prosperous collective farm, with the ruins of the cultural palace and a monument to the watermelons recalling past riches.

The water from the reservoir used to come right up to Shostak’s home, but now, the jetties lead to nowhere, with high grass growing from the clamshell-covered ground. The small river that used to flow into the reservoir here has been reduced to a trickle. "Soon, you won’t be able to see that there was a river here at all," says Shostak.

Shostak has been a fisherman for 27 years, "and there hasn’t been a single day in my life that I haven’t worked," he says. "Now, it feels like someone has cut off my hands."

His boat is lying beneath a tree at Osokorivka’s former swimming hole, a heavy wooden rowboat, seven meters in length. The fishing cooperative has seven boats, each with a crew of three, and they would head out year-round, except during the breeding season from April to June. On good days, says Shostak, he was able to bring in 700, sometimes even 800 kilograms of fish – bream, carp, catfish, crucian carp. When the war advanced to the Dnieper, Shostak was still able to fish in the inlet out in front of his home.

On the morning after the dam’s detonation, he watched in horror as the water receded, five centimeters per hour. "At some point, I couldn’t go down to the shore anymore," he says. After a week, his cove was empty. All his hopes are pinned on the dam being rebuilt as quickly as possible. They can take their time with the hydroelectric plant, he says. The most important thing for him is that the reservoir fills up again. "Half a year should be enough for that." The fish, he says, are still there – back in the old riverbed to which the Dnieper has returned.

Shostak has planted a few bell pepper seedlings on the bottom of the empty cove, and they have flourished. But he would rather be catching fish than harvesting vegetables in the former reservoir.

The Falling Water Table

A well is being drilled in a field not far from Osokorivka, with workers standing around a boring rod mounted on a truck. A digger is excavating a trench nearby in case the Russians start firing on them.

One hundred new wells are being dug by November to cover the water needs of the northern part of the Kherson Oblast, says Andriy Volodin, 52, who is overseeing the work on behalf of an excavation company. The water table has fallen dramatically, he says – far more than the water level in the reservoir itself. Prior to the blowing up of the Kakhovka Dam, groundwater could be tapped at a depth of 38 meters (125 feet), but now, says Volodin, you have to drill 60 or 70 meters deeper. "The weight of the Kakhovka Reservoir used to push the water up toward the surface. Now the pressure is gone, and it has receded."

The water from the wells will likely be a bit salty, says Volodin, but it will be good enough for irrigation. "If there is no irrigation here, you can only really plant nut trees or, at the most, watermelons, though that might not work so well," he says. "I’ve already noticed that the melons are smaller than in previous years."

But the reservoir wasn’t just vital for farming: Entire cities relied on its water. In Nikopol, there was no tap water for one-and-a-half months. During a visit to the city in late June, there were people all over the place carrying plastic jugs on their way to get water, with the fire department bringing in water in tanker-trucks. By the end of July, running water had been restored in the city, likely out of the old Dnieper riverbed for the time being. But neither the mayor’s spokeswoman nor the head of the water utility wanted provide the exact source, "for security reasons."

The industrial city of Kryvyi Rih, hometown of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and situated 60 kilometers from the reservoir, also received water from there by way of a canal. Now, it must be brought in from a different reservoir further upriver.

And then there are the canals that bring water from the Kakhovka Reservoir to the hot, arid steppe on the left bank of the Dnieper – one heading for Crimea, the other leading off toward the Sea of Azov. The most severe water shortages are not in the communities on the former banks of the reservoir, but much further away – in areas under Russian control.

Early Warning

That is the reason many did not take seriously the warnings that the Russians were preparing to blow up the dam.

"We have information that Russian terrorists mined the dam and aggregates of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant," Zelenskyy announced on October 20, 2022, in an address to the European Council. He warned of "catastrophic consequences."

What then took place during the night of June 6, 2023, could be heard by residents of Beryslav, a town at the end of the reservoir with a proud history and an unobstructed view of the Kakhovka Dam. From here, it's possible to see the origins of the catastrophe, if you will.

But getting to Beryslav is a difficult and dangerous undertaking. The Russian-occupied left bank of the reservoir is not far away, and artillery fire is a constant companion. Columns of smoke can be seen in the distance.

Beryslav leads the life of a frontline city. The streets, lined with low houses, are deserted in the afternoon, with every citizen fully aware that they can become a target. There are a number of rules: Do not attract attention, do not stay in one place for too long, always park your car under a thick canopy and darken your windows at night.

From the big bell installed to commemorate the city’s Cossack past, the view stretches out over the former reservoir. In the foreground, the Dnieper flows past in its old riverbed, with the dried-up lake bottom and Russian-controlled left bank behind it. To the right, the Kakhovka Dam is clearly visible: the sluices and the collapsed machine hall, the surviving part of the dam and the huge gap, through which the water now rushes unhindered on its way to the Black Sea.

Just off Beryslav’s former jetty lies a pile of cracked-open bank ATM machines on the clamshell-covered ground. "The Russians threw them into the water during the occupation," says Maryna Ilnytska, 30. Her blue summer dress, dotted with white flowers, looks like a cheerful statement against the war and desolation. "Sometimes, I ask myself: Aren’t you afraid with the Russians standing on the other riverbank? But then I answer: On the contrary! I was afraid when they were on this bank!"

Ilnytska works for a regional aid fund called "The Ukrainians Will Win," which distributes food packages and construction materials to residents in need. She lives with her parents and husband in a house with an pretty garden and wine pergola. There are fish hung up to dry along with a bucket full of shrapnel that has been collected.

When there are air raid warnings, they head down to the storage cellar. A ladder leads straight down to the mattresses and a shelf full of preserves. Ihor, her father, has laid out a red-and-white string leading up out of the cellar so that search teams can find them should they be buried inside.

The Ilnytskys lived for more than eight months under Russian occupation, experiencing two house searches, fear and harassment. They hid their Ukrainian flag in a pile of towels. The Russian tricolor, meanwhile, flew from the dam on the very first day of the invasion, the enemy advance was so quick. Moscow needed the dam to get across the Dnieper, and they also needed the water. The North Crimean Canal begins right next to the dam, supplying parts of the peninsula with water, but the Ukrainians had blocked the canal in 2014 after the annexation. The Russians immediately reopened it after conquering the dam.

When the Russians pulled out of Beryslav in November – not without loading plundered flat-screen televisions onto their armored personnel carriers – the Ilnytskys celebrated.

But that’s when the bombardment of the city really got underway. The gymnasium of the teacher’s college, where her father Ihor once taught physical education, is now a pile of rubble. In April, Russian drones went after buses belonging to the aid fund, which were parked next to the Ilnytskys’ home, dropping explosives from the sky. In June, a heavy guided bomb smashed into the neighbor’s house, the blast wave strong enough to blow the doors in the Ilnytskys’ home off their hinges. It took two hours before they found the neighbor’s body – with no arms or legs.

Two days before that attack, the family was again taking shelter in the storage cellar with its musty smell because of an air raid warning. Between 2 and 3 a.m., Ilnytska heard several explosions, separated by mere seconds. And then a strange new noise began, a distant rumbling that was loud at times, fainter at others – "like an airplane flying in a circle," says her father. The noise would continue for several days.

It was the Dnieper, thundering through the breached dam. Breaking out of the prison that had held it captive for seven decades.

The initial explosions were apparently the detonations that destroyed the dam. The robust construction of the barrier and the depth of the breach indicate that the dam must have been blown up from the inside. The explosives were apparently detonated inside the access tunnel, which runs through the concrete foundation – to which only the Russian occupiers had access.

Two days before the dam was blown up, the Ukrainians had launched a counteroffensive, for which Kyiv had spent months building up reserves. Even before that, the Ukrainian army had tried to cross the river to the left bank below the dam. Flooding those areas made sense from Russia's perspective.

The destruction of the dam, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a news conference a week after the event, "ruined their counteroffensive in this direction." It was a comment that didn’t fit particularly well with his claim that the Ukrainians had destroyed the dam themselves.

A New Dam

The reservoir held 18 cubic kilometers of water, and when the dam failed, a wall of water several meters high rolled toward the Black Sea. On the Ukrainian-controlled right bank of the Dnieper, 31 people died. The Kremlin-installed chief of the occupation administration on the left bank recently spoke of 57 victims.

The waters have since receded. But the water shortage above the dam site will remain. In mid-July, the Ukrainian government resolved to rebuild the dam and the hydroelectric plant – with much higher capacity – once the eastern bank of the river is liberated. The costs are estimated to exceed $1 billion. Environmental activists have demanded that there at least be a debate about the reconstruction, pointing out that elsewhere in Europe, rivers are being restored to their natural states.

Ihor Pylypenko, a geographer at the University of Kherson, isn’t particularly moved by such arguments. "If I had been asked in 1950 if this dam should be built, I would have said no. Now, it’s different," he says over the phone. The dam and the system of canals it fed didn’t just divert water into the arid steppes, he points out, people also followed the water. This isn’t a development you can just reverse after three generations. The water problems on the west bank, in Kryvyi Rih and Nikopol may be solved without the dam, he says, but that’s not true for the east bank. Nature, says Pylypenko, can do well without the dam, but people no longer can.

Pylypenko grew up on the shores of the reservoir and warned of the consequences of the dam’s destruction before it happened. "Russia would leave behind sun-scorched earth," was the final sentence of his article for the Eastern European affairs journal Osteuropa. "One day after it was published, the dam was blown up," he recalls.

Silver Spoons and Cossack Pipes

But there are people who don’t mourn the dam. One of those is Andriy Seletskyy, the young head of the military administration in Novovorontsovka.

A history teacher by training, Seletskyy has an office that looks like a museum, with rusty artillery shells on the ground and aerial photos of Novovorontsovka made by the Germans during World War II on the walls, along with several flags of countries from which he has received donations. He also has a blackboard from the local school which the Russian occupiers scrawled an apology in chalk: "Forgive us children of Ukraine! We are not murderers, but Russian soldiers. People like you. This is a war of the politicians."

As unusual as the office is, it reflects its occupant. Seletskyy has no experience in administration. Prior to the invasion, he worked in tourism marketing, before joining the Red Cross as a volunteer and evacuating people from the frontlines. On two occasions, he says, fighters of Chechen strongman Ramsan Kadyrov threatened to shoot him.

His town has suffered greatly in the war, with 40 percent of the houses damaged – and fully 70 percent in the surrounding municipality. But Novovorontsovka hasn’t been fired on since November, and almost half of its 7,000 residents have returned.

A hobby diver, Seletskyy has spent years scouring the floor of the reservoir for interesting finds, hoping to one day establish a "museum of flooded memory." Now, he can find his exhibits in the sand of the lakebed. In his cabinet, Seletskyy spreads out his treasures: a Cossack pipe made of clay, coins embossed with the image of the last czar, a key, a seal with a family’s coat of arms, two silver spoons. "If I hadn’t found them myself, they would be in the pawnshop," Seletskyy says. There are a lot of treasure hunters with metal detectors out and about these days, he adds.

The reservoir, Seletskyy says, was around for 70 years, while Novovorontsovka is far older. "Our ancestors lived for much longer without the reservoir than we did with it. And they lived well." He is hoping that Ukrainians can use the crimes committed by the Russian occupiers to their advantage. "If they destroy the hydroelectric facility, then we’ll just resuscitate the Great Meadow," he says.

Velykyi Luh, the Great Meadow, is what the area flooded by the reservoir used to be called. The floodplains of the Dnieper River were the home of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, whose fortresses dotted the region. Their military republic is seen as the predecessor of the Ukrainian state. As such, Moscow once "drowned Ukraine" with the building of the Kakhovka Dam, writes the columnist Vitaliy Portnykov. Not just the destruction of the dam was a crime, he argues, but its construction was as well.

Seletskyy exudes optimism as he leads the way through his half-destroyed village with its shot-up facades. He points proudly to the beach, from which the water has receded. In the mud, you can see the foundations of the neighborhood that was once flooded by the reservoir. Seletskyy says he imagines installing boardwalks so that visitors can look down on the ruins from above, "like on the antique remains in Rome or Athens."

It is a wild dream in the middle of the war. But the reconstruction of the dam, as the government in Kyiv is planning, is also nothing but a dream at the moment.

Seletskyy looks out over the beach to the opposite riverbank. "First," he says, "we have to drive out the Russians."

It is the sentence with which every conversation at the former reservoir ends.

With reporting by Katja Lutska and Fedir Petrov