Photography by Jędrzej Nowicki

On a hot summer day in Ukraine, two young boys named Timur and Slavik were playing on what used to be the banks of the Kakhovka Reservoir, part of the Dnieper River. I met them when I was visiting the area in July. The air’s tranquility was occasionally pierced by the sounds of fighting in a frontline town not far away. This region is a focal point of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, and in June, evidence suggested that Russians, trying to slow down their enemy’s advance, blew up the Kakhovka Dam.

I wanted to witness the devastation firsthand. It soon became clear that the collapse would reshape the landscape for decades to come. Everything south of the dam was swallowed by the murky waters of the river.

Downstream, in the city of Kherson, the flooding forced thousands of people and animals to evacuate, many of them under Russian fire. Northeast of the dam, the reservoir has turned into a barren, muddy plain stretching to the horizon. The task of rebuilding from this environmental disaster is now added to the challenges facing Ukraine when hostilities with the Russians cease.

Built in the 1950s, the Kakhovka Reservoir was close to the size of Utah’s Great Salt Lake and supplied water to all of southern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula. Water from the dam irrigated farms and orchards, and the electricity generated by the dam’s hydropower plant was used in villages throughout the region. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear-power plant also used reservoir water to cool its reactors. Now all of that is gone. In its place lies an uncertain future for the farming and fishing industries.

One day, I started a conversation with an old man who was washing his car behind a fence. His home was not far from where the shoreline of the reservoir used to be. Bob Dylan was playing from a tiny speaker. The man, who said his name was Ihor, invited me up on his roof to survey the scene. “There is no such view of our new desert from any rooftop around,” he told me. We sat together on the top of his dacha as the sun began to set on what I could see was now a surreal lunar landscape.

The receding water of the Dnieper River exposes a dock and fishing harbor in the village of Bilenke.

Anti-tank barriers along the road between Nikopol and Kherson, which runs parallel to the Kakhovka Reservoir A couple embrace where the water once flowed on the Dnieper River, in Zaporizhzhia.  

In the village of Marianske, a bridge has been blown up at the edge of the reservoir. Destruction of bridges has been a strategic tactic employed throughout Ukraine since the beginning of the war. Residents of the village of Oleksiivka in the aftermath of the Kakhovka Dam’s destruction A woman fetches water from the drying river in Oleksiivka.

A monument to watermelon, a symbol of the Kherson region. The irrigation canals that feed the region have dried up. Fish found at the bottom of the Sukhyi Chortomlyk River dry under the scorching summer sun. The dried bottom of the Kakhovka Reservoir On the Sukhyi Chortomlyk River, people struggle to access the remaining water. Residents of Nikopol get drinking water from one of the humanitarian-aid points in the city center. The city has been dealing with a water shortage in taps. A cow grazes on one of the farms in the village of Malokaterynivka, with the dried-up Kakhovka Reservoir in the background. In the village of Kushum, boys swim in the Dnieper River. The water level in certain areas of the river has decreased by more than five meters.

The Sukhyi Chortomlyk River, which flows through the village of Oleksiivka, has almost completely dried up since the dam’s destruction. A man pumps leftover water from the Sukhyi Chortomlyk River to irrigate apple orchards in the area. The receding water of the Kakhovka Reservoir

"Inefficient" and bad for the environment – some environmentalists are arguing against the reconstruction of the Kakhovka Dam, despite the widespread devastation caused by its breach.