I realize that all people want to do is talk about Donald Trump (myself included), but sometimes other issues are worth knowing about. One of them is the habitability of Ukraine after Putin has been defeated and brought to justice for crimes against humanity that he so richly deserves.
Fred Pearce writes an excellent piece in Yale Environment 360.
What happens to the environment when a large, industrialized country is consumed by war? Ukraine is finding out. While concern about human lives remains paramount, Russia’s war on that country’s environment matters. The fate of Ukraine after the conflict is over is likely to depend on the survival of its natural resources as well as on its human-made infrastructure – on its forests, rivers, and wildlife, as well as its roads, power plants, and cities.
Some 30 percent of the country’s protected areas, covering 3 million acres, have been bombed, polluted, burned, or hit by military maneuvers, according to its Ministry of the Environmental Protection and Natural Resources. Some of the most intense fighting of the war has been in forests along the Donets River in the east.
Fires have raged across Ukraine, which is almost the size of Texas. Satellite monitors spotted more than 37,000 fires in the first four months of the invasion, affecting approximately a quarter-million acres of forests and other natural ecosystems. Most were started by shelling, and a third were in protected areas, says the Ukraine Nature Conservation Group (UNCG), a non-profit coalition of the country’s scientists and activists.
Away from the country’s forests, the war has caused other kinds of environmental damage. Rare steppe and island ecosystems in the south have been pummeled, threatening endemic grassland plants and insects; in the north, the exclusion zone around the stricken Chernobyl nuclear reactors has been left largely unattended; and rivers across the Donbas conflict zone in the east are being polluted by wrecked industrial facilities, sewage works, and overflowing coal mines. Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, sits on the front line, with its future in the balance and growing fears of radiation releases. Meanwhile, under the cover of martial law, there may be an upsurge in uncontrolled logging of ancient forests in the Carpathian Mountains.
Perhaps no existing ecosystem alarms scientists more than the steppe grasslands. Before the Great Acceleration, these native grasslands comprised large swathes of central and southern Ukraine. Now only three percent remain due to Ukraine transitioning to a world food basket.
This native remnant host scarce and endangered species. Planting wheat and Vlad the Bloody's invasion in the area has meant that twenty endemic species may disappear from the face of the earth.
In addition to the nations' remnant of grasslands, the Crimean peninsula has forty-four species found nowhere else on earth, the botanists at the United Nations CommunicationsGroup report.
The loss of biodiversity in the west of Ukraine is also a significant concern as millions of refugees from the war-torn nation camp in the forests "including the Carpathian Biosphere Reserve, which reputedly contains the world's largest ancient beech forest, and the Synevir National Nature Park, which has a brown-bear sanctuary." Whether these forests have been cut down for firewood and shelters was not mentioned in the story from Yale.
Perhaps no event worries the world more than the Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, with its Ukrainian staff forced by the occupiers to continue operating it. The only consoling news on the reactor and cooling towers is that it is stronger than the Chrenoble plant, where a nuclear disaster accident in 1986 poisoned a thousand square mile area that is known as the exclusion zone.
The exclusion zone has been a boon for an accidental rewilding of the zone. Forests and large mammals have all returned over the decades. But, the Russian army occupied Chernoble early in the invasion. Those troops looted the fire engines and radioactive monitoring equipment that was used to control encroaching wildfires. Before the Russian army evacuated from the zone, they set mines and left munitions throughout the exclusion zone.
Greenpeace does excellent work, and its presence in Ukraine is no exception. Greenpeace Germany and Ukraine's State Agency for the Management of the Exclusion Zone combined forces and released the following in July of 2022. Author Fred Pearce shared the jaw-dropping link below.
Their research showed that radiation levels in areas where Russian troops were stationed, dug trenches, and from whence they conducted active military operations are at least three times higher than the levels measured by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in April 2022.
At a Russian military camp near Yanov Station, Greenpeace measured radiation dose rates ranging from 0.18 µSv/h (microSieverts per hour) up 2.5 µSv/h at a height of 10 centimeters above ground. The highest rate exceeds IAEA’s measurement by three times. In another example, the dose rate reached 7,7 µSv/h at a site 1.5 km from the former Russian checkpoint and near the Red Forest, much higher than the IAEA reported.
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Greenpeace is concerned that “the IAEA is seriously compromised in its nuclear safety role in Ukraine due to its connections with Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency (Rosatom), including the IAEA’s current deputy director Mikhail Chudakov, a long-time former Rosatom employee,” the organization noted in a press release.
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According to Burnie, the IAEA does not want to explain to the world the true aftermath of the intrusion of Russian troops into the exclusion zone and the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant itself.
Lead radiation specialist at Greenpeace Belgium Jan Vande Putte added: “We measured levels of gamma radiation inside the abandoned Russian trenches that qualify it as low-level nuclear waste. Clearly the Russian military was operating in a highly radioactive environment, but that’s not what the IAEA is communicating. We can only conclude that the IAEA for some reason decided not to make an effort to fully investigate. It’s clear from our survey that there is nothing normal about the radiation levels inside the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, despite what the IAEA wants the world to believe.”
The environmental degradation only gets worse. There is concern about the bombing of the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol as it "could have released tens of thousands of tons of hydrogen sulfide into the Sea of Azov with unknown ecological consequences."
Sewage spews from the remains of industrial centers as oil leaks and has found its way into Ukraine's wetlands in the Donbas.
Because of hostilities, coal mines abandoned after 2014 "with pumping of water halted, they have released some 650,000 acre-feet of polluted mine water into the environment, according to Serhii Ivaniuta of the National Institute for Strategic Studies in Kyiv."
The whole investigative article is full of material I have not noted in this diary. Pearce's article is a must-read.