Kamianska Sich
Right-bank Dnieper steppe of feather grass and deep gullies at the site of an eighteenth-century Zaporozhian Sich — occupied, liberated in the Kherson counteroffensive, and left near the river front.
Kamianska Sich sits on the high right bank of the Dnieper above the Kakhovka reservoir, in the Beryslav district of Kherson oblast. Declared in 2019, its 12,261 hectares protect one of the better-surviving fragments of the true southern steppe — the ravine-cut grassland of the Dnieper terrace between the villages of Chervonyi Maiak and Kachkarivka, seamed by the deep Kamianska and Milova balkas that drop toward the water. This is feather-grass and tulip country, ground that has been almost entirely ploughed away elsewhere in the region: botanists count over five hundred vascular plant species here, nineteen of them in Ukraine's Red Book, and the fauna runs to the outsized predatory bush-cricket Saga pedo and the burrowing mole-vole that works the grassland soils.
The name is history, not scenery. This was the site of the Kamianska Sich, one of the fortified river-camps of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, which stood here in the first decades of the eighteenth century — roughly 1709 to 1711 and again around 1730 to 1734 — after the destruction of the old Sich upstream drove the Cossacks to relocate. The otaman Kostiantyn Hordiienko, who led the Zaporozhians in that turbulent period, is buried on the site, and the ground is managed in part as a historical reserve, with a memorial cross and monuments among the grass. Steppe and Sich are the two halves of the same protected place.
The war has run straight through it. From March to November 2022 the park was under Russian occupation, its buildings wrecked and its equipment stripped, the ground mined and littered; occupiers even carried off rare plants by the thousand. It was freed in November 2022 in the Ukrainian counteroffensive that liberated Kherson and the right bank, but liberation put it on the river's edge rather than behind the lines — the Dnieper here is the front, with Russian forces on the far bank. The destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June 2023 dropped the reservoir and dried out the shoreline ecosystems below the steppe, a second, quieter blow after the shelling.
What's worth knowing before you go
The park is on Ukrainian-held ground again, but it is not open. It sits close to the Dnieper front, within reach of the far bank, and the two occupations plus the fighting left it heavily mined and strewn with munitions; demining and hazard clearance have continued for years and the territory remains dangerous and closed to visitors. Nothing here is a travel recommendation.
Its recent history is the point worth carrying away: a rare surviving patch of Cossack-era steppe that was occupied, plundered, liberated at real cost, and then left to sit beside the war's river line. The staff's task now is survey and clearance — establishing what is left of the grassland and the historical site under the mines — before there can be any question of walking the balkas above the Dnieper again.