UKR. EVIDENCE IS ‘DAM’NING

Phone call, blast signs 'prove it was Rus'

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-ahalf-minute audio recording on its Telegram channel in which two men are heard discussing in Russian the aftermath of the 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.

The man on the recording comments that “thousands” of animals had been killed at a “safari park” downstream from Nova Kakhovka after the dam failed.

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.

The SBU offered no further details. It said it had opened a probe into war crimes and “ecocide.”

‘Confirmation’

“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 was a deliberate act, a senior Biden administration official told The New York Times on Friday that American spy satellites equipped with infrared sensors spotted an explosion at the huge hydroelectric station just before it gave way.

The flood from the dam collapse killed at least nine people in the Kherson region 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. “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.”

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.