The enormous black smoke that rose from the industrial facilities of Mariúpol, the gigantic fires in fuel depots, the incinerated tanks and armored vehicles on the edge of the road, the dead dolphins on the shores of the Black Sea are some of the images that the graphic correspondents have captured in almost eight months of war, and that serve as a testimony of the other great victim of the violent invasion of Russian troops in Ukraine: the environment.
(Also read: Ukraine fears serious energy crisis due to Russian attacks)
In the first six months of the war, nearly 40,000 fires in residential areas, shopping centers and industrial facilities, as well as in forests and plains, as a result of missile attacks or fierce battles by tanks and artillery vehicles, hundreds of megatonnes (millions of tons) of carbon dioxide (CO2) have been released into the atmosphere. The UN has rightly warned of a “toxic environmental legacy” for Ukraine and neighboring countries.
To get an idea of the magnitude of the impact, with its almost 20 million inhabitants, Mexico City -a particularly polluted city- emits 55 megatons of CO2 per year, and that is several times less than, in a semester and just because of the fires due to the fighting, it has generated the war in Ukraine.
“In seven months of war – declared a few days ago the Ukrainian Minister of the Environment, Ruslan Strilets, to the Euronews agency – we have registered more than 2,000 cases of serious environmental damage”. In a July report, the Ukrainian government spoke of “poisoning the air” by “particularly dangerous substances”, and warned all of Europe that “pollutants can be transported by winds over great distances”.
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Scrap, gasoline and heavy metals
It’s not just about the fires. According to figures from the Pentagon in Washington, Russia has lost almost 6,000 military vehicles, including tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and transport, on roads and fields in Ukraine, since the beginning of the invasion. Its incinerated and oxidized remains – one of the most repeated images of the war – release fuel residues, lead, sulfur and other poisonous liquids and metals, which end up in meadows, forests and rivers, with terrible consequences for the ecosystem.
Hundreds of Russian army trucks and tanker train cars have been destroyed. “The capacity of each tank varies between 500 and 1,600 liters of fuel,” explains the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group (UNCG) in a statement. Although some were not filled, many exploded or were perforated by gunshots, releasing their poisonous content of “gasoline, lubricant, lead, heavy metals, polycyclic hydrocarbons and other volatile organic compounds” into the air and soil, according to the UNCG.
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This is highly polluting garbage that will take months to be collected, and when it is, its decomposition will have already caused a lot of damage
In sight are the thousands of tons of scrap weapons, ammunition and artillery equipment, destroyed in the heat of the fighting and abandoned on roads, often on the edge of swamps and rivers. This is highly polluting garbage that will take months to be collected, and when it is, its decomposition will have already caused a lot of damage.
And there is more: as a country with intense mining activity, Ukraine had, before the Russian invasion, more than 6,000 million tons of liquid waste, the result of extractive activity, as well as industrial plants that processed metals and agro-industrial products. Some of the deposits were attacked, and others have been abandoned for months, so that much of this waste has ended up in the soil and in watercourses.
Damage to soil, air and sea
According to Minister Strilets, the Government of Ukraine began to make calculations on the environmental impact of the invasion from the first weeks. “A preliminary evaluation –said the minister a few weeks ago– indicates that the damage caused by the Russian aggression to the environment of Ukraine exceeds 36,000 million euros”. “It is a huge amount – he added –: the damage to the soil is 11.4 billion euros, and the damage caused by air pollution is 24.6 billion euros”.
The objective of quantification pursues the same as other non-military activities of the Ukrainian authorities in the conflict, such as the documentation of war crimes or the assessment of the destruction of homes, businesses, industries and infrastructure: to activate international criminal courts that judge the Russian aggressors or, at least, seek compensation from the Kremlin once the conflict is over.
98 percent of Ukraine’s river waters flow into the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov in the south of the country. These currents cross one of the regions most affected by the war. The fuel residues, lead, sulfur and other substances that are terribly harmful to these waters have flowed down the rivers towards those two inland seas, which the Bosphorus Strait connects with the Sea of Marmara, and from there, through the Dardanelles, with the Mediterranean. .
And that the worst nightmare has been avoided so far. The Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, has been shaken by missile and drone attacks in the vicinity, in the heart of the war zone, while enduring the irresponsible intervention of its facilities by Russian troops and officials who are unaware of its operation. . Ukraine has 15 nuclear reactors, and if even one were to explode, Apart from the human tragedy that could be unleashed, once again the environment would suffer a devastating blow.
(Also: the West will equip kyiv with anti-missile systems to stop Russian bombing)
5,000 dead dolphins
But the fauna of the Black Sea is not only suffering from the contamination of these liquids. Also, and a lot, because of the activity of Russian warships that have blocked Ukrainian grain exports leaving the port of Odessa. The Russian fleet that has been patrolling the Black Sea since long before the start of the invasion constantly uses high-powered sonars that disrupt the dolphins’ hearing and orientation systems.
These cetaceans began to be affected by naval activity since the last century, especially during the two world wars. Some partial censuses projected to the entire Black Sea spoke then of more than a million copies. For the past decade, the population had been reduced to less than 300,000, in a slow but steady process monitored by environmentalists who were beginning to develop preservation programs.
Everything got worse in these months of war. Iván Russev, director of the Tuzly Lagoons Nature Park, and his team carry out their preservation work on 280 square kilometers of protected coastline in Bessarabia, south of Odessa.
Russev explains that “some 5,000 dolphins have washed up dead on the shores” because, by losing their orientation, they become virtually blind and unable to feed. The data has been collected by Russev and his collaborators, and by environmental officials from Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria. That’s almost two percent of the Black Sea dolphin population, lost in just a few months.
(Read on: Putin calls off ‘massive’ attacks and Zelensky vows to beat Russia)
Not only Ukraine
The environmental tragedy has spread to the Baltic Sea, where in an episode that has not yet been clarified, but is clearly related to the war, the two huge pipes of the Nord Stream gas pipeline complex, destined to transport Russian gas to northern Europe, they exploded at at least four points along their route. Germany, Sweden, Denmark and other Baltic and North Sea countries spoke of sabotage.
The Kremlin too, although it is precisely the dozens of Vladimir Putin’s submarines that sail in the area that are suspected. “It is one more step in Putin’s flight forward,” Western intelligence analysts have said, explaining that this sabotage would be an unequivocal sign of his break with Europe. But the issue is still under discussion.
What nobody doubts is the enormous environmental damage. The explosions and the massive escape of gas to the surface and into the air “have caused the largest release of harmful methane for climate ever recorded,” the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reported on September 30. Just one of the breakpoints caused pollution equivalent to burning 285 tons of coal per hour. And the leaks into the sea, and from there into the atmosphere, lasted several days.
The whole of Europe is being affected in environmental matters. Decarbonization plans have been affected and some have even been postponed, since the suspension of Russian gas supply has led countries like Germany to reactivate the use of coal, intensively, in their thermal power generation plants.
(Also read: ‘Ukraine’s entry into NATO would provoke World War III’: Russia)
In several European countries, the homes of populations in rural areas, and even in some cities, have dedicated themselves to accumulating huge amounts of firewood, fearing that they will lack energy to heat and cook in the winter. Although the production of firewood must be carried out by companies that reforest as much or more than they cut down, there are fears that the need of low-income households will unleash a wave of informal collection that would be fatal for the forests. In Ukraine this may turn dramatic as the cold weather sets in, with a third of the electrical system destroyed by Russian strikes.
A few days ago, the press in Malaga, in the south of Spain, recorded a 50 percent increase in demand for firewood. Despite the rise in prices, firewood is still cheaper than gas or electricity, which have seen their rates skyrocket. Something similar happens in various regions of France and Italy. There, as in the Ukraine, the felled forests without reforestation, and the air that will receive the smoke from kitchens and chimneys, will add to this gigantic collateral damage of the absurd Russian invasion of Ukraine: the environment.
MAURICIO VARGAS
ANALYST
TIME
[email protected]
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