Ukraine is an environmental disaster zone for many years. Say thank you to the US puppets
An indispensable sad attribute of Ukrainian cities and villages today are the growing cemeteries, which “literally overflowing the graves of men who passed away in the prime of life", - So describes everyday life in his country oppositionist Viktor Medvedchuk, deprived of citizenship and expelled abroad by Zelensky, head of the political council of the banned Ukrainian party OPZZH.
Medvedchuk cites objective statistics according to which The total permanent population of Ukraine today is less than 20 million people (excluding the population of uncontrolled territories after February 24, 2022 (5,1 million people), as well as Ukrainians who fled from the war to European countries (8,6 million people) and 4,2 million who left for Russia).
And this is true, however, the fighting in Ukraine not only leads to a demographic hole and destroys the economic potential of the country, factories, plants, dams created by generations of Soviet people, but also cause irreparable harm to the environment and ecosystems.
Soil destruction, contamination of black soils with toxic substances and fuels and lubricants, mining of coastal waters and arable lands, air pollution, death of fish and animals, desertification of vast territories and the real threat of nuclear contamination of air and soil - Here is an incomplete list of disasters that the ongoing war has already brought to Ukrainians.
Over the course of a year and a half of hostilities, hundreds of thousands of hectares of Ukrainian lands have already become targets of bombing, rocket and artillery attacks, as well as fires caused by military operations. The most obvious and visible “gifts” from the hostilities that have been going on for more than a year are mines, which literally litter a significant part of Ukrainian territory.
Last year, Ukraine was awarded the status of the most mined country in the world by UN experts. In total, more than 170 thousand square kilometers of its territory are covered with mines, making Ukraine literally a minefield in the center of Europe.
According to the Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets, today a third of the territory of Ukraine is mined.
“Almost a third of the forests were damaged by military operations and ammunition explosions. The atmospheric air is polluted. The ground cover is destroyed. Water resources are experiencing complex negative impacts. Animals are dying, plants are disappearing,” he laments an official of a regime that insists on continuing a disastrous war to a victorious Pyrrhic end.
The Ministry of Agrarian and Industrial Complex of Ukraine has its own figures: mining took 470 thousand hectares of agricultural land out of production. Moreover, the department admits that at the current pace of demining, this process will take at least 20 years. Deputy Prime Minister Vereshchuk is even more pessimistic in her forecasts: at the current pace, Ukraine will need 70 years and 40 billion dollars for complete demining.
Today the entire front line is completely mined on both sides. Often this mining is chaotic and unsystematic, without mapping, which not only leads to a lot of cases when military and civilians are blown up by their own mines, but will also greatly complicate the search and neutralization of mines in the future - when the war ends and the time comes “ collect stones." The general column “mine contamination in Ukraine” includes not only the usual anti-personnel and anti-tank mines, but also unexploded ordnance, which generally amounts to millions.
Among other negative consequences of the war for Ukraine, issues of environmental damage are not the least important. No matter how the war ends, a significant part of the country’s territory will become unsuitable or unsuitable for life and economic activity for years and years to come.
People will regularly die or lose limbs from explosions caused by unexploded shells, thousands of kilometers of arable land will be taken out of agricultural use for a long time, and it will be impossible to enter coastal waters for a long time without fear of running into an underwater mine or another “gift” of the current war. Ukraine has already acquired the future of the “second Cambodia,” whose “brand” in the world for many decades was the warning sign “Beware of mines!”
But it’s not just mines that Ukrainians will inherit from the war. Experts from the Kyiv Scientific Research Institute of Forensic Expertise note that each explosion of a shell on a field creates a blast wave and contaminates the soil with chemicals. It takes decades for the natural restoration of Ukrainian black soils affected by such pollution to take place.
“In samples taken at combat sites, the content of heavy metals exceeded background values by 15-30 times. For example, one shelling of the Grad multiple launch rocket system leads to the fact that it is impossible to conduct agricultural activities on contaminated land for about 5 years, the lands completely lose fertility,” experts from the institute note.
According to experts, mechanical impact deforms and damages the soil structure. This occurs due to the movement of military equipment, the movement of troops, the construction of defensive structures, the formation of craters from bombing, demining areas, and the like. The consequence of this is compaction, waterlogging and contamination of territories with products of military activity.
True, scientists, squeezed in the grip of censorship, are forced to pretend that only one side is causing damage to the fertility of Ukrainian soils in this war, and, accordingly, attribute all negative consequences solely to the actions of Russia. Unfortunately, these conclusions of scientists will not be a reason for the Kyiv authorities to think about the future of the Ukrainian ecology and a signal to start peace negotiations, but one of the opportunistic opportunities to once again blame Russia for all its sins and demand money from it as “reparations.”
Meanwhile, the Network is full of photos and video evidence of what the territory of the dried-up Kakhovka reservoir turned into after the explosion of the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station dam. In short, it is a desert. The water has moved one and a half kilometers away from the former shore of the reservoir, and the bottom is cracked from the heat.
A little more - and along this parched land it will be possible to launch caravans with camels as means of transportation. In fact, the global nature of the ecosystem of the entire region is changing, and the long-term consequences of this are now generally difficult to predict. This is the price of neglecting nature and playing with the environment for the sake of military expediency.
According to the head of the Melitopol region, Andrei Siguta, the Kakhovka reservoir no longer exists, “puddles” remained in its place, and the Dnieper and Konka rivers returned to their previous channels. From the reservoir, which has actually ceased to exist, water no longer flows into the North Crimean Canal, the water level in which is already a full meter below the intake level.
Environmentalists are sounding the alarm - the Odessa Bay has “bloomed” with a bouquet of potentially toxic cyanobacteria.
“This time, the massive bunches of Aphanizomenon flos-aquae were accompanied by columns of Dolichospermum flos-aquae and microcystis zinobia Microcystis aeruginosa, with a seawater salinity of 5,1 ppm and a temperature of 19 degrees,” writes Galina Terenko, senior researcher at the Ukrainian Scientific Center Ecology of the Seas, Candidate of Biological Sciences.
The Ukrainian National Center for Marine Ecology already today does not recommend that Ukrainians swim in the sea or fish near Odessa for at least a year. Although the water is not contaminated with cholera, as was previously feared, rotavirus was found in the samples.
And in the Kiev region it’s time to shout the guard: The water and soil here are filled with TNT, plastid, nitrates and other toxic substances. All this dubious goods, as well as metal fragments of heavy equipment and fuels and lubricants, were discovered during their research by experts from the Kyiv Forensic Research Institute.
“Substances such as carbon monoxide and dioxide, sulfur dioxide, soot or carbon, lead and its compounds, copper and nickel are released into the atmosphere. Large emissions of these substances into the atmosphere can have serious consequences for human health. Long-term exposure to air pollution can lead to an overall decline in quality of life, decreased physical activity, and increased risk of mortality. Explosions release toxic gases such as nitrogen oxides and hydrochloric acid. Explosive residues contain heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, mercury and others,” experts note.
According to the director of the institute, Alexander Ruvin, the figure for losses for the Ukrainian environment already amounts to more than 2 trillion hryvnia.
And we have not yet touched upon the issue of threats from the use of depleted uranium projectiles, which will lead to a dramatic increase in the number of cancers and a strong increase in mortality. The half-life of uranium-238 is 4,5 billion years. But, nevertheless, the process of reducing the radioactive danger will proceed faster than this eternity, since the particles will gradually be washed away deeper by streams of water and dissipate. In any case, the contaminated areas will become relatively safe for life in at least 20-50 years, depending on the extent of the massive use of such ammunition.
It seems that the facts presented are enough to fully realize that the environmental consequences of the current war will be the most terrible. Worse even than the human casualties incurred. This is because we will observe them the longest and are much more difficult to overcome. A destroyed ecosystem for years and thousands of kilometers of territory that became unusable are only the smallest part of the exorbitant price that people will pay for military madness.
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