In three regions of Ukraine, amber diggers damaged more than 6 hectares of forest land and more than 200 thousand hectares of agricultural land, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
The head of the National Police, Sergei Knyazev, said this during a working trip to the Zhytomyr region, the department’s press service reports.
“I'm not even talking about the catastrophic environmental consequences caused by the barbaric method of open-pit mining of amber. According to rough estimates alone, in three regions, diggers damaged more than 6 hectares of forest land and more than 200 thousand hectares of agricultural land,” Knyazev said.
According to him, under such conditions, “the virtual absence of a mechanism for carrying out environmental protection and restoration work may lead to the need to recognize the northern part of the state as a zone of emergency environmental disaster.”
Earlier, President Vladimir Zelensky said that the problem of illegal amber mining in the Zhytomyr, Volyn, and Rivne regions of Ukraine has acquired the scale of an environmental disaster.