The biggest “ecocide” in history unfolds as Russia rolls out diabolical weapons and measures specifically designed to destroy Ukraine’s environment. Where are the world’s environmentalists, or climate change politicians who cloak themselves in “green causes” to win votes?
Where is the outrage at the fact that Russian planes, or artillery, scatter landmines called “little petals” that have contaminated nearly one-third of Ukraine’s land and forests, equivalent in size to Austria and Hungary.
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It will take years and billions to de-mine the country and until that’s accomplished hundreds of thousands of people and animals will be injured or killed.
“Scattered from aircraft or delivered by mortars, the ‘petals’ spin through the air, bite into the earth and explode upon contact with as little as five kilograms of weight. Hectare by hectare, Russia’s invasion turns barren the country which contains almost a quarter of the world’s chornozem, a highly fertile soil.
Even after the contaminants are removed, the toxins they release will affect the fields’ fertility for years,” wrote Dr. Sasha Dovzhyk, a researcher with the Ukrainian Institute. At a recent conference in New York she added “ecocide is now a tool of war”.
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Ukraine has become the world’s biggest minefield. But this isn’t the first environmental catastrophe that Russia has visited upon Ukrainians. In 1986, Kremlin incompetence caused a nuclear reactor to explode at Chernobyl, spreading radioactivity across the country and Europe. Now a massive steel and concrete structure, or sarcophagus, covers that reactor and is located inside a 30-kilometer exclusion zone, 90 kilometers from Kyiv. The accident, and the Kremlin coverup, contributed mightily to the dissolution of the Soviet Union by revealing its dysfunction and colonial disregard for life.
Now Putin doubles down. In March 2022, right after the February 24 invasion, his army occupied Chernobyl and took over Ukraine’s four operating nuclear complexes, including the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), Europe’s largest. Operations are overseen by Russian military officials who permit limited oversight by the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA). This is a disaster waiting to happen. The NEA recently wrote: “The IAEA observers at ZNPP reported that they continued to be denied timely and appropriate access to all areas important to nuclear safety and security.”
Maintenance is inadequate and there is insufficient power or water to keep reactors cool at all times. Testing and inspections are also a problem and Ukrainian power officials have been banned from the site. The staffing of the facility has gone from 11,500 workers to 4,500. Then on June 6, 2023, the Russians blew up the Nova Kakhovka dam – 80 miles away – and dangerously reduced the water levels in the reservoir that cools ZNPP’s reactors. Water is now pumped in from local wells.
The Russians have also set up a military base around the plant and are shelling nearby Ukrainian areas with impunity because shelling back would be catastrophic. The strategy is demonic: Putin now has control over the safety of all Ukrainian nuclear facilities, as well as over the integrity of the Chernobyl sarcophagus which prevents the escape of radiation. This is eco-terrorism on an unimagined level: If just ZPNN explodes or is blown up, a meltdown would cause a massive fire and explosion that would release radiation over a vast area.
As shown in the video, a radioactive cloud would spread across many countries - from Russia in the east to Poland in the west - over a 72-hour period. Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and Russia would all be affected. IAEA Director General warned last year of problems: “We are living on borrowed time when it comes to nuclear safety and security at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Unless we take action to protect the plant, our luck will sooner or later run out, with potentially severe consequences for human health and the environment.”
And the odds of catastrophe increased after the destruction of the Nova Khakovka dam by Russia – a bombing that Moscow denies and blames Ukraine for doing. This act of ecological terrorism is the first involving a dam and unleashed water equivalent in size to America’s gigantic Great Salt Lake in Utah which is larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island. The flooding caused damage to humans, animals, topsoil, forests, wildlife, livestock, farming, local industries, villages, infrastructure, and drinking water. It was the “first ever” intentional dam explosion, commented Dovzhyk. “Ecocide on this scale should be a crime in the International Criminal Court and isn’t yet.”
Another environmental cataclysm unfolds at a large Donetsk coal mine where an underground nuclear test was conducted years ago by Russia and left behind massive amounts of radioactive material. Now Russian-occupied since 2022, mine maintenance has been neglected and the radioactive portion of its underground shafts have flooded which has resulted in radioactive water seeping steadily into a vast portion of Eastern Ukraine’s water table. This didn’t occur before because the water that entered the underground mine was pumped out to avoid flooding and contamination.
Putin’s ecocide is also a war against the Global South because he despoils Ukrainian food lands that feed hundreds of millions of poor people around the world. Arif Husain, chief economist at the UN World Food Program, said last fall “we tend to address the symptoms and forget the root cause, and the root cause is war. The numbers do not lie. Pre-Covid we were looking at about 135 million people in crisis or the worst type of food security situation. Today, including Ukraine’s impact, that number is 345 million. There are about 50 million people in the world who are what we call in hunger emergencies, meaning one step away from famine. That’s the magnitude, that’s the scale of the problem we’re talking about.”
The countryside is scarred with landmines, but also with pock marks, and are vicious aerial attacks without value other than to permanently destroy the agricultural base. “Two dozen experts who spoke with Reuters — including soil scientists, farmers, grain companies and analysts — said it would take decades to fix the damage to Europe's breadbasket due to contamination, mines and destroyed infrastructure - and that global food supplies could suffer for years to come. Shelling has also upset the delicate ecosystems of microorganisms that turn soil materials into crop nutrients such as nitrogen while tanks have compressed the earth, making it harder for roots to flourish,” reported Indian broadcast network NDTV.
Putin is barbaric and uncivilized, and his tactics are borrowed from ancient times. Thousands of years ago, Roman soldiers, after each murderous conquest, would sprinkle salt on occupied lands to ensure that nothing could ever grow there again, then steal and enslave the women and children. Today, Russia’s Evil Empire transgresses nuclear proliferation treaties too by turning nuclear reactors into potential “dirty” nuclear bombs. An occupied nuclear plant that can be blown up is a nuclear weapon.
And yet the world’s noisy and well-funded green movement stands silent as this global ecological tragedy unfolds.
That is simply unforgiveable.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
Reprinted from dianefrancis@substack.com – Diane Francis on America and the World
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