PRYPIAT – FEBRUARY 4, 2020 – A military vehicle is pictured at the Hotel Polissia as part of tactical drills for Ukrainian Interior Ministry units. These drills allow them to practice interoperability while defending a place, urban combat tactics, response to the aftermath and defending a city in Prypiat or the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone in Kyiv Region. Image: Volodymyr Tarasov/ Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images
As Russian troops take Chernobyl and invade the highly-industrial separatist-controlled Donbas region, experts worry that on top of the primary death and destruction associated with war, the invasion could create a permanent environmental catastrophe associated with nuclear material and other toxic chemicals stored throughout the regions.
A consultant to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry Thursday morningRussian troops from Belarus entered the nuclear disaster area around Chernobyl. The advisor warned that fighting around Chernobyl might disturb nuclear waste in the exclusion zone—a 1,000-square-mile region surrounding the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster.
“The Russian Federation military is pushing beyond the previously established contact line, with their heavy military presence compounding soil, water, and air risks,” Kristina Hook, assistant professor of conflict management at Kennesaw State University, who studies environmental fallout of conflict in Ukraine wrote in an email to Motherboard. “As of the time of this writing, it is also being reported that the Russian military has seized the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a factor that some Ukrainians refer to as holding Europe hostage.”
Experts are concerned that Russian bombings in Donbas, a Russian-occupied separatist area in the eastern part, could cause long-term environmental damage.
“The east of Ukraine is heavily industrial, full of chemical factories, run-down mines and thermal power plants. The potential for an environmental catastrophe to add to the horrific humanitarian crisis is enormous,” said Richard Pearshouse, head of crisis and environment at Amnesty International in Geneva.
Ukraine is home to 15 nuclear power reactors across four plants that supply about half of its energy needs—if struck, they could release radioactive waste that would The area has been contaminated for thousands of years. One of these facilities is the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, located about 125 miles west the Donbas combat area. Could soon find itself on the frontline of conflict. This would cause unknowable environmental damage, and would also threaten the country’s energy security (the plant provides around a quarter of the country’s overall electricity supply.)
“Turning the Ukraine into a dystopian landscape, pockmarked by radioactive exclusion zones, would be an extreme method to obtain the defensive zone Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to want. Managing a massive Western-focused migratory crisis and environmental cleanup would absorb Europe for years,” founder of the Themistocles AG national security consultancy Craig Hooper Forbes warnsDecember
Donbas alone has 900 active and idle coal and metallurgical mining sitesThese pollutants have led to a decline in local air quality and leaching of toxins into local water supplies. Satellite imagesTerra Motion, the UK’s spatial analysis company, captured abandoned mines in the region rising up with water between 2015 and 2020. This was due to neglect by the separatist regime according to David Gee (senior technical officer at Terra Motion). Toxins from abandoned mines are supposed to be regularly cleared out and treated to prevent the mine from flooding uncontrollably, Gee explained—since this hasn’t been happening, a number are filling up with water and could leak into nearby rivers at any moment.
Donbas is a “ticking toxic time bomb,” Wim Zwijnenburg, humanitarian disarmament project leader at PAX, a Dutch peace organization, Bellingcat, 2017.. In an interview with Motherboard, he noted that Ukraine has, in recent years, poured money into addressing environmental concerns in the region, and these investments have “now been undone.”
“The slow investments being built up, and the knowledge and expertise built up in the last couple of years has now been undone,” he said. “We are now in the dark when it comes to the risk of the flooding of the mines, when it comes to toxic and radioactive waste, we are now in the dark when it comes to who is dealing with all these factories, and there’s probably experts working in those chemical factories who are now fleeing or who will be killed.”
Flooding around mines in Donbas—the site of years of fighting between Russia and Ukraine—have long stoked concern over a “second Chernobyl,” the Telegraph reportedThursday morning The Yunkom coal mine, in particular, was flooded by the Russian army in 2018—a move that the US state department At the time, be warned would “threaten the drinking water of thousands of Ukrainians in Russia-controlled East Ukraine.”
“This has been a problem that has been building for a while,” Gee said.
A 2015 Assessment by the World Bank of environmental risks in the highly-industrial region estimated that 10-20 mines had been flooded in armed conflict, “potentially causing massive environmental damage in the region.” Attacks on select power plants have also caused the Oil spillagethe release of toxic substances into the air and waterways. The paper names Donbas as one the most polluted regions in Ukraine.
“The current crisis will make all of this worse,” Hook said.
“Our research shows that approximately 3.4-million people already lack access to safe water as a result of environmental degradation caused by the conflict, and this escalation will significantly worsen this,” she added.
Hook will be opening in October 2020 Co-developed a toolTo analyze environmental risks in warzones, using Ukraine as a study: Armed conflict within the Donbas region would result in more than 11,000 deaths, nearly 2-million displaced persons, 4.4-million people needing humanitarian assistance, she wrote in an article. Environmental threats pile on to these harms in a way that’s difficult to quantify, but will likely be permanent without remediation.
“Due to the persistence of pollutants in ecosystems, they will remain active and harmful in the Donbas and in the global ecosystem even if/once peace is achieved,” Hook writes in the paper, co-authored with Richard Marcantonio, researcher in international peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. “The people inhabiting the Donbas region will continue to suffer and literally embody the damage for decades to come.”