'Return to life' Forest takes root two years after dam was blown up

At the southern tip of Europe’s largest river island, the ground falls away into a vast and unexpected vista.

- Vincent Mundy Malokaterynivka

From a high ledge on Khortytsia Island, the view opens up to swaying willows and mirrored lagoons. Some of the trees are already many metres tall, but this is a young forest. Just a few years ago, all of it was under water.

"This is Velykyi Luh - the Great Meadow," says Valeriy Babko, a retired history teacher and army veteran, standing on the former reservoir shoreline at Malokaterynivka village. For him, this extraordinary environment represents more than nature alone.

"It is an ancient, mythic terrain, woven through Ukrainian folklore," he says. "Think of all those Cossacks galloping through its valleys of forests so dense the sun barely pierced them."

That historic landscape vanished in 1956, when the Soviet Union completed the Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power plant and flooded the entire region. What had once been an ecological and cultural cradle became a reservoir, and its rich, living systems were entombed beneath the water.

Then, in 2023, that water was unleashed as a weapon: the Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River, under the control of Russian forces, was blown up. (Russia denies bombing it.) It sent a vast, destructive flood of water and sediment downstream, destroying villages and killing an unknown number of people; figures for the death toll range from a few dozen into the hundreds. Up to one million people lost access to drinking water. Two years on from the disaster, the reservoir’s future still hangs in the balance. Scientists say it represents both a “return to life” for the ecosystem and wild creatures that inhabit it - and an unpredictable, potentially toxic timebomb. It is a case study in the complexity of how nature responds to vast changes wrought by humankind - and what happens to ecosystems in the wake of disaster.