Losses resulting from the June 2023 destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant has reached around $14 billion, Ukraine’s Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, Svitlana Hrynchuk said during an interview on the state-owned Rada tv channel.
“Nearly $14 billion in losses have been calculated due to the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and the loss of these water resources,” the minister was quoted as saying by Interfax-Ukraine.
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The volume of water resources lost by the breaching of the dam is the equivalent of half the reserves of some African countries, Hrynchuk said.
Around 30 percent of Kherson’s specially protected natural areas were flooded and lost, the minister said.
Another after effect by the destruction of the dam was the cutting of the water supply to affected regions and farming.
Hrynchuk said the government is actively working with support from foreign donors to identify new sources of water supply and is constructing new channels to provide the population with quality drinking water.
On June 6, 2023, Russian forces blew up the dam that held back the Kakhovka Reservoir, one of the largest in Europe. Built in the 1950s, the huge reservoir had a volume of 18 cubic kilometers (4.3 cubic miles) of water – almost the entire volume of water in the Dnipro River, the source of the artificial lake.
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The reservoir provided electricity through the associated Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant as well as supplying water for agricultural irrigation in the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipropetrovsk regions, as well as in Crimea.
Oleksiy Danilov, an advisor to President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that Ukrainian military intelligence had identified Russia’s 205th Motor Rifle Brigade as the unit most likely to have installed and detonated explosives inside the dam.
Kyiv Post previously visited the settlements that used to be on the shores of a man-made lake. The reservoir is now overgrown with grass and wild plants. The Dnipro riverbed has narrowed to its natural width and runs a few kilometers from nearby villages while Russian forces still occupy the far side of the Dnipro River.
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, current and projected figures point to total losses for Ukraine of $1.2 trillion in revenue and $386 billion in lost added value.
The loss estimates, from Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), include actual losses during the period February 2022 to June 2024 plus a forecast of projected losses up to the end of 2025.
The KSE report includes estimates of damage to sectors that contribute most to Ukraine’s GDP, including $43.1 billion from Ukraine’s energy sector.
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