Life returns to Ukrainian reservoir drained by Russian strike on dam

Standing in a scene of shimmering green, Vadym Maniuk pointed to a young white willow tree. “What happened here is a miracle,” he said. “Some of the saplings are already 4 metres tall. There is nowhere else like this on the planet. Not even the Amazon comes close.”

Maniuk, an ecologist, picked his way through a jungle of new branches. The sky above was scarcely visible. In the mud – cracked after days of sweltering temperatures – were the remains of molluscs. The scientist showed off black poplars, also racing upwards, reeds and a small mulberry. Under the leaves it was pleasantly cool.

Just over a year ago, the spot where Maniuk stood was under several metres of water. In the 1920s Stalin ordered the construction of a series of hydroelectric power stations along the Dnipro. The area between two of the dams – one in Zaporizhzhia, the other in Kakhovka – became a vast artificial lake.

This Soviet reservoir swallowed up ancient Cossack sites as well as vegetable gardens and grazing pastures used by generations of Ukrainian villagers as a source of food and fuel. The Kremlin promised modernity instead: electricity and irrigation for fields and collective farms across the southern region.

In 2022, with the USSR long gone, Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of independent Ukraine. The reservoir quickly became part of the frontline. Russian troops sat on the left bank, Ukrainian forces on the right. Then, in June 2023, Moscow blew up the Khakovka power plant downstream as Kyiv began a big counterattack.

The explosion released more than 14 cubic kilometres of water, flooded settlements and killed at least 35 people. Last month Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, described the destruction as a “deliberate and calculated crime”. In the immediate aftermath, the reservoir resembled an alien landscape, barren and desertlike.

Within a couple of months, however, the first green shoots appeared. “I visited in August last year. It was already bright green. I was in shock, in a good way,” Maniuk said. “Before, there was a lot of water. People didn’t use it much. Now it’s enthralling and full of life.”

Related: The disastrous bursting of Ukraine’s Nova Kakhovka dam – and the battle that is to come

This week, Maniuk visited Malokaterynivka, a village once popular with fishers, on the railway line to Crimea. Its station closed when all-out war began. The Russians were about 10 miles away and smoke billowed in the distance. On the banks of the ex-reservoir are boulders and a white nacreous shore made up of dead molluscs, millions of them.

Beyond that, the forest begins. According to Maniuk, the canopy covers about 140,000 hectares, and looks similar to the primordial forest of 100,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Russian soldiers have not entered it. “You can’t see anything. Anyone going inside would get lost. There are bogs and rivers,” he said.

In the absence of humans, animals and birds have taken up residence. A cuckoo and swallows flew above the treeline. A local shopkeeper, Karina, said she saw wild boar from her second-floor balcony. “Scientists say rebuilding the reservoir after Ukraine wins will cause a second ecocide. I’m more worried the boar will eat our vegetables,” she said.

The Dnipro has resumed its old course. Fish not seen for eight decades have reappeared, including sturgeon and herring. Police discovered this remarkable fact when they arrested a group of poachers. In their boat were 16 endangered sturgeon. “Maybe the fish have a genetic memory. The water is fast-flowing again. There are more bream and perch,” Maniuk said.

The reservoir’s demise hasn’t thrilled everybody. The pipes that supplied Malokaterynivka with water have gone dry. Since June the authorities have been delivering drinking water by truck. Residents on Central Avenue, formerly known as Lenin Street, queue up with buckets. The town’s beach, where locals swam in summer, has vanished.

“Our roses and tomatoes are dying. We can’t water them properly any more,” said Lida Spilnyk, walking in her kitchen garden. Her husband, Hennadiy, complained that his potato harvest was smaller than usual. The village mayor, Liudmyla Volyk, was blunt: “We don’t need a nature park. We want our water back.”

Volyk said residents frequently heard explosions. Two Ukrainian helicopters clattered above the village, previously home to 3,200 people and now reduced to 2,500. Russian shelling had damaged properties, the mayor said, adding that 13 “of our boys” had died fighting Russia, with four missing. “We are sitting on a powder keg,” she said.

Mykhailo Mulenko, the head of the nature protection department at the Khortytsia national reserve, said the loss of water was a socioeconomic blow. But he added: “The reservoir was bad for nature. Now we have a chance to use what happened for change.” His preferred solution in the future was to rebuild a smaller reservoir or a navigable canal, he said.

In the meantime, biodiversity is flourishing. The Khortytsia Island reserve looks out on the Dnipro dam in Zaporizhzhia, once a featureless lake and now a chain of gull-filled rocky islands and rapids. These would have been familiar to the 16th-century warrior Cossacks who built a fortress on its banks as part of a fledgling Ukrainian state.

A chain of ponds and reed-filled lagoons have emerged. The island’s coves are littered with dead clams and fish. Mulenko, however, said the new ecosystem had boosted the number of yellow-bellied toads, frogs and water snakes. Sand martins swooped over the surface of the water, and spotted flycatchers squeaked in the treetops nearby, attracted by abundant insects.

Ruddy shelducks were recently spotted bobbing in the water together with Canada geese, which are little seen in Ukraine. Moss and lichens were thriving, Mulenko said. The island is home to a small population of roe and sika deer. “I think we have a very interesting ecological system. In a way, it’s a wonder. There is nothing else like this in Europe,” he said.

Discussions over the reservoir began well before Russians blew up the Khakovka dam and road crossing in Kherson oblast. Ukrhydroenergo, the power station’s operator, says it should be entirely reconstructed. This would take at least five years and cost $1bn (£770m), it estimates. The government in Kyiv shares this view. Environmentalists want the territory to develop naturally.

The water’s retreat, meanwhile, has exposed archaeological sites hidden since the 1950s. They included bronze age barrows, Scythian pots and Cossack fortifications, as well as other artefacts left behind by third-century Goths and medieval Tatars. The Soviets deliberately submerged many of them in order to eradicate Ukraine’s rich pre-Russian history, Mulenko claimed.

Writing in the fifth century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus gave a vivid account of Scythian culture, geography and religion. The Black Sea region “is quite full, as it happens, of trees of all kinds,” he noted in his celebrated Histories.

Denys Sikoza, the deputy head of heritage protection in the Kherson region, said: “We don’t know much about these sites. The digs that did take place in the early 20th century used old-fashioned methods.” Items recovered included ceramics, jewellery, bracelets, weapons and a 2,500-year-old clove of garlic found in an ancient stove.

Over the past year, archeologists have made only a handful of trips to the newly exposed monuments. The area is dangerous and a military zone, Sikoza pointed out. Some potential expedition spots were disappearing again under a carpet of green foliage, he added. “We would like to investigate them. For now, it’s not possible. Maybe it never will be. And of course we have no access to occupied territories,” he said.

Back in the reservoir turned jungle, wind rustled gently through the willows. “There is a unique smell here. It smells of bugs,” Maniuk enthused, holding a thickening sapling branch. What would happen next? “There’s big competition for water. The trees that survive will mature in 50 or 60 years, first willow and then species such as oaks. We will have a magical forest.”