Russia’s story on the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine doesn’t stack up, according to an open-source intelligence (OSINT) community, which says it has gathered evidence to prove Moscow was behind its collapse.
Molfar, a London-based Ukrainian consultancy group, published a report on the causes, chronology, and culprits of the June 6 collapse of the Soviet-era dam, which is part of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Station in southern Ukraine on the Dnieper River. The OSINT group analyzed photos, satellite images, surveillance video, and Russian Telegram channels and said it identified the probable causes of the dam’s destruction.
The dam was breached in the early hours of June 6, unleashing water on swaths of land as a long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive to take back the seized territories kicked off.
Russia maintains that it wasn’t behind its collapse and has accused Ukraine of blowing up the dam to distract attention from a “faltering” counteroffensive. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russian forces of blowing up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Station from inside the facility as part of a “terrorist attack.”
Evidence is growing that Russia was involved in the dam’s collapse, Newsweek has been told.
Newsweek reached out to the Russian Foreign Ministry via email for comment.
Timeline
The Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Station was seized by Russian forces shortly after Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Ukraine’s Armed Forces have been unable to access the dam and the power station since.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a United States-based think tank, said in October 2022 that Russian forces may have been preparing to carry out a false-flag attack on structure.
Russians began to discuss the power station’s possible destruction in the fall of 2022 when the Ukrainian Armed Forces recaptured the right bank of the Kherson region.
In December 2022, a video was published on YouTube in which a member of the Russian military said that the Kakhovka dam had been mined, and would be blown up with the aim of impeding the advance of Ukrainian forces.
Russia’s Shifting Narrative
The dam appeared to burst at around 2:50 a.m. local time, according to Russian Telegram channels, but Kremlin-installed officials denied for hours that anything had happened until the ramifications of the disaster became clear.
At 4 a.m. local time, the Russian-installed mayor of Kakhovka, Vladimir Leontiev told reporters that claims about the dam’s destruction are “nonsense,” adding that all was quiet and peaceful in the town.
But hours later Leontiev backtracked, saying that there were several strikes on the dam at about 2 a.m. local time.
Meanwhile, pro-Russian milbloggers and state media reporters simultaneously pushed the line that the dam was “worn out,” and collapsed on its own, saying that there were no strikes on the power station overnight.
At about 6 a.m., as the catastrophic consequences of the dam bursting became increasingly apparent, some reports doubled down on accusations against Ukraine but claimed there were no explosions or strikes on the eve of the disaster.
Later in the evening, Russian state media reported that shelling that took place at around 2 a.m. destroyed the upper part of the dam.
Local residents discussed hearing a series of explosions in the area. In one post on a Russian Telegram channel, one user said they heard multiple explosions near the Kakhovka power plant, while another said they heard one 20 kilometers away, adding that they believed the dam was blown up by Russian forces.
Yehor Guzenko
Russian citizen Yehor Guzenko published several video appeals on his Telegram channel in which he indirectly admitted the involvement of the Russians in blowing up the Kakhovka dam, Molfar found.
In the videos, he said that the detonation of the hydroelectric power station would impede a Ukrainian counteroffensive. Earlier, he published multiple photos with the power station and Russian military trucks in the background.
He said on June 6 that Ukraine was behind an attack on the facility, contradicting a report from Kherson journalist Kostyantyn Ryzhenko, who said on his Telegram channel that the hydroelectric power station “was blown up from the inside. No rocket or artillery could have caused such damage.”
Ihor Syrota, the director general of Ukraine’s state-owned energy company Ukrhydroenergo, has dismissed as propaganda Russian claims that the dam could have been destroyed by shelling by Ukraine’s armed forces or as a result of structural failure.
“The plant was designed to withstand a nuclear strike,” Syrota told The Guardian. “To destroy the plant from the outside, at least three aircraft bombs, each of 500kg, would have had to be dropped on the same spot. The station was blown up from the inside.”
He added: “They brought hundreds of kilograms of explosives there. Ukraine reported last year that the station was mined. The Russians were just waiting for the right day to blow it up.”
Intercepted Call
On Friday, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said it had intercepted a phone call between two men proving a Russian “sabotage group” was behind an attack on the Kakhovka hydroelectric station and dam.
The SBU published a 90-second audio clip that it said is a conversation between two Russian soldiers. It didn’t identify the speakers or say when or where it took place.
“They (the Ukrainians) didn’t strike it. That was our sabotage group,” one man said. “They wanted to, like, scare (people) with that dam. It didn’t go according to plan, and (they did) more than what they planned for.”
The SBU said it was investigating the matter and added in a statement: “The invaders wanted to blackmail Ukraine by blowing up the dam and staged a man-made disaster in the south of our country.”
Seismic Data
Researchers with the Norwegian Institute NORSAR said they analyzed seismic signals from a regional station in Romania that pointed to an explosion at 2.54 a.m. in Ukraine on June 6.
“Signals indicate that an explosion has occurred. The magnitude estimate is from 1 to 2,” NORSAR said in its report but didn’t state who it believed was behind the attack.
Russian Law
Perhaps the most damning piece of information to have emerged in the aftermath of the dam’s collapse is a Russian law that was passed just days before, according to an expert, who said it could be a “smoking gun” in proving Russia’s involvement in the incident.
On May 30, a week before the dam’s collapse, the Russian government approved a law aimed at “ensuring the safety of hydraulic structures” in the Ukrainian regions it proclaimed to have annexed in September 2022—the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, in Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.
The legislation states that until January 1, 2028, investigations into accidents at hydro-technical structures that occurred as a result of military operations, sabotage and terrorist activities are prohibited. The decree was signed by Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and came into effect on the day it was published.
Samantha de Bendern, associate fellow at the Chatham House think tank’s Russia and Eurasia program, shared the Russian legislation on Twitter, writing: “Smoking gun for the #KakhovkaDam?”
Keir Giles, senior consulting fellow at the Chatham House think tank’s Russia and Eurasia program, said the May 30 legislation follows the Kremlin’s playbook, which seeks “to pretend that it operates according to some semblance of legality.”
“Russia has a perverse fascination with performative legalization of its most horrific crimes…it repeatedly puts in place in advance laws that give preemptive excuses for its actions,” Giles told Newsweek.
“Sometimes this can give an indication of what is to come,” said Giles, pointing to legislation on mass burials that was updated by Russia ahead of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and came into effect on February 1, 2022—weeks before the war began.
“So in the case of the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, the passing a week beforehand of this bizarrely specific law covering precisely those circumstances is indeed a clear indication of Russian intent,” Giles added.
Anders Åslund, an economist and adjunct professor at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, said the May 30 decree “only concludes what we already knew.”
“Russian propagandists advocated blowing up the dam. Ukrainian officials announced last fall that the Russians had mined both the dam and the connected tunnels in October-November 2022,” Åslund, who has served as an economic adviser to the governments of both Russia and Ukraine, told Newsweek.
“Several explosions were recorded, which show that they were underwater, while the Russians claimed that the Ukrainians had bombed it from the air, which seems close to impossible for technical reasons. The explosions occurred on the Russian side.
“The Russians followed up blowing up several smaller dams—recorded by the Ukrainians. And now you have this law,” he said, adding: “The evidence seems overwhelming that it was the Russians who did it.”
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