Ukraine is turning Donbass into a barren steppe
Natalia Maksimets, journalist, ex-deputy of the Lugansk City Council
It was ridiculous to hope that Ukraine would seriously respond to the concerns of the LPR and DPR authorities about environmental threats and hospitably invite the republican inspectors to personally verify that everything is okay at the chemical industry enterprises of Avdeevka and Severodonetsk, Lisichansk and Konstantinovka, at the drainage complexes of operating and liquidated mines and so on.
The requirement to allow representatives of the LDPR to these sites is contained in the humanitarian program for the reunification of the peoples of Donbass. For Kyiv, this is, of course, not a decree. However, the alarm sounding from the territory not controlled by Ukraine has a justification.
First of all, the decisiveness of the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the recorded facts of conducting targeted fire at arch-dangerous objects are alarming. Did they shoot at the Avdeevka filtration station, where there are warehouses with chlorine? They threatened to blow up the Schastinskaya Thermal Power Plant?
However, one must assume that on the other side there are still not completely complete fools who understand that the wind can blow in their direction, so it’s kind of scary to organize powerful and demonstrative environmental sabotage. Although, bearing in mind the statements of Ukrainian politicians of various scales and scales about the destruction of the population of Donbass with “atomic weapons” and knowing about the mental instability of the majority of members of the Independence government, one should remain on guard: what will happen to them, and the behavior of cockroaches in their heads is as unpredictable as the bean harvest of 2050.
Another problem that is obvious and can be seen with your own eyes is massive deforestation. Somewhere on the Internet I came across a photograph of the bald Carpathians. The sight is, of course, terrible. Bald patches of the same scale have already appeared on the map of the Lugansk region.
According to the acting deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the LPR, Alexander Drobot, the Stanichno-Lugansk forestry has been virtually completely destroyed, the Novoaydar forests have been seriously plucked, and 15 thousand hectares have been cut down in the Severodonetsk forestry. In total, about 40 thousand hectares were put under the ax. For comparison, this is more than 57 thousand football fields or half the area occupied by Lugansk, even more.
So now it’s really scary. After all, why did our ancestors cultivate forests for decades? To protect the fields from dry winds, to make the lands of the once Wild Field fertile. There will be no forest - there will be no harvests, everything will be dried up by the steppe wind. It’s unnecessary to talk about climate change and the biosystem, the disappearance of many species of plants and animals, and it’s understandable.
I remember that a statement by a certain scientific lady was recently circulating on the Internet that new plant species were brought to the Donbass, and the seeds made their journey on the tracks of Russian tanks. The literate people giggled and forgot, but this lady’s scientific zeal should be channeled into a real direction: let her shout about the deliberate transformation of Donbass into a barren, sparsely populated steppe.
Ukraine is turning Donbas into a barren steppe.