Nova Kakhovka residents heard explosions before flooding of Kakhovka HPP: Here’s what we know about the destruction of the dam on the Dnipro

The Washington Post and Financial Times journalists Evan Hill and Christopher Miller also commented on the damage on Twitter. They pointed out that between May 28 and June 5, parts of the road above the dam and the sluice gates were damaged or destroyed. Hill commented that shortly before the dam broke, water levels in Kakhovka Reservoir reached unprecedented levels. This could have happened because Russia kept too few floodgates open, wrote The New York Times.

Bellingcat investigative journalist Aric Toler tweeted: “I'm far from an engineer, but maybe Mother Nature destroyed the dam, not Ukrainians or Russians?” However, he later deleted the tweet.

On his part, Ruslan Leviev, founder of the investigative organization Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), claimed that judging by the discharge of water under the fallen piece of road, the dam could have gradually collapsed on its own. “Maybe that's what caused the piece of road to fall, given that there was a hole there a long time ago. I would look at even older photos to see how long ago this water discharge started appearing,” the expert wrote. Leviev also referred to a video, which likely shows a former employee of the power plant showing the power plant building and says that there was no strike.

However, Natalia Humeniuk, press secretary of the Ukrainian army’s Operational Command South, claimed that the HPP was blown up, adding that the explosion did not occur due to a missile strike, but a blast from within the plant building. By blowing up the HPP, the Russian troops decided to slow down the counterattack of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said Humeniuk. The Ukrainian mayor of Nova Kakhovka, Volodymyr Kovalenko, said that the machine hall at the hydroelectric plant had been blown up.

Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, also claimed that the dam was blown up by Russia during a stream on journalist Alexander Plyushchev’s YouTube channel. Podolyak claims that the explosion was carried out by the Russian army’s 205th Motorized Rifle Brigade in order to affect the AFU’s counteroffensive.