Ukraine claimed Friday that it intercepted a telephone call between Russian soldiers that “confirms” that Moscow’s saboteurs destroyed the Nova Kakhovka dam — as Norwegian seismologists revealed they had detected a possible blast around the time of the dam’s breach.

Ukraine’s domestic security agency, SBU, posted a one-and-a-half-minute audio recording on its Telegram channel in which two men are heard discussing in Russian the aftermath of the dam collapse.

“[The Ukrainians] didn’t strike it. That was our sabotage group,” says one of the men on the call, described by the SBU as a Russian serviceman.

“They wanted to, like, scare [people] with that dam.”

“It didn’t go according to plan, and [they did] more than what they planned for,” he adds.

Discussing the fallout from the destruction of the dam, the man on the recording comments that “thousands” of animals had been killed at a “safari park” downstream from Nova Kakhovka.

The man on the other end of the line then expresses surprise at the soldier’s claim that Russians had destroyed the dam, which has been under their control since the first months of the invasion.

The Post could not independently verify the recording. Moscow has not commented on the contents of the phone call.

What to know about this stage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine

7

1. Bakhmut

Ukrainian forces continued advancing around the city of Bakhmut in the east, claiming gains along the Bila Hora-Andriivka and Bila Hora-Kurdyumivka lines southwest of the city that was captured by Russian troops in May. Over the past week, Ukraine’s General Staff reported that Kyiv’s fighters had liberated more than 1.5 square miles of territory in the area, including an important position outside the strategic village of Klishchiivka. Capturing the village itself, which lies on higher ground, could potentially allow Ukrainian soldiers to encircle Russians inside Bakhmut.

2. Tavria

Ukraine claimed to have recaptured several villages in the south of the country as part of its budding push toward the Sea of Azov, with the aim of cutting off Russia’s land bridge linking occupied areas in the east to Crimea. A general in charge of that sector said his troops repelled 27 enemy attacks and inflicted hundreds of casualties on the enemy.

3. Zaporizhzhia 

Kyiv’s forces launched a successful missile strike on a Russian base in the occupied town of Tokmak in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, killing as many as 200 soldiers and the town commandant. Overall in the eastern theater, Ukraine’s military said its troops had retaken 65 square miles of territory since the start of the counteroffensive in early June.

4. Berdyansk and Melitopol

Kyiv’s forces reportedly inched forward more than half a mile in the Berdyansk and Melitopol directions in the south in recent days — and a total of more than 5 miles since the beginning of counteroffensive operations in these directions. In Berdyansk, a key port city on the Black Sea, a Ukrainian Storm Shadow missile strike this week leveled a hotel housing Russian military commanders, among them a high-ranking general who was killed. 

5. Bakhmut

Kyiv said its troops had advanced about a mile on the flanks of the ravaged city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, which was seized by Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries in May after months of fighting and handed over to the regular units. Moscow claimed it had fought off the assault, and senior US officials said that Ukrainian troops in the east sustained “significant” losses in soldiers and equipment.

6. Belgorod

Pro-Ukrainian rebels have been carrying out raids into the Russian city of Belgorod located on the border with Ukraine, as Kyiv’s forces continued shelling the city and sowing chaos. Thousands of residents have been evacuated from the region, sparking fury in the Kremlin. Partisans taking part in the Belgorod campaign said when Crimea is liberated, they will march on Moscow.

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The SBU offered no further details of the conversation or information about its participants. It said it had opened a criminal investigation into war crimes and “ecocide.”

“The interception by the SBU confirms that the Kakhovskaya HPP (Hydroelectric Power Plant) was blown up by a sabotage group of the occupiers,” the SBU said in a statement accompanying the audio clip.

“The invaders wanted to blackmail Ukraine by blowing up the dam and staged a man-made disaster in the south of our country.”

Meanwhile, seismic data picked up by the NORSAR observatory in Norway showed activity at 2:54 a.m. local time on June 6 indicating an explosion — with the timing of the explosion coinciding with media reports of the dam collapse.

“The signal that we are analyzing, the way the energy is recorded on the sensors at distance, clearly shows us that this is an explosive-type character compared to many other explosions that we monitored in the past,” Volker Oye, head of research at Norsar told Reuters on Friday.

Further bolstering the argument that the catastrophic flooding in Ukraine was a deliberate act, a senior Biden administration official told the New York Times Friday that American spy satellites spotted an explosion at the huge hydroelectric station just before it gave way.

The flood from the dam collapse killed at least nine people and left thousands more homeless, officials said. Several hundred stranded Ukrainians were rescued from rooftops in the flood zone Thursday.

“By blowing up the Kakhovskaya HPP dam, the Russian Federation definitively proved that it is a threat to the entire civilized world,” SBU chief Vasyl Malyuk said in the statement.

“Our task is to bring to justice not only the leaders of Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s regime, but also the ordinary perpetrators of crimes,” he added.

Russia has denied responsibility for the destruction of the dam and accused Ukraine of sabotaging the site to distract the world’s attention from the launch of its counteroffensive, which it said was failing.

According to NORSAR, the detonation took place within a radius of 30-50 miles of the dam.

However, additional evidence from surveillance footage and chatter on Telegram channels suggest that the dam had been breached before 2:54 a.m.

Security video reviewed by BBC Verify shows that the dam had been damaged by 2:46 a.m.

Local Telegram users also reported hearing blasts at 2:18 a.m. and then again at 2:40 a.m.

Meanwhile, the US official speaking anonymously to the New York Times said that spy satellites equipped with infrared sensors detected a heat signature consistent with a major explosion before the Kakhovka dam collapsed, sending torrents of water into the surrounding area.

US intelligence analysts suspect Russia was behind the incident, but the official said that intelligence agencies do not have concrete evidence about who was responsible. 

With Post wires