A number of non-government-controlled districts in eastern Ukraine are threatened by an environmental disaster, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister for the Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine Oleksiy Reznikov has said.
“Few people know that in 1979, on the territory of the Yunkom mine, which is now in temporarily occupied Donbas, the Soviet government carried out a nuclear explosion: 300 tonnes of TNT. After the explosion, the radioactive capsule was left dry and water was pumped out of the mine to prevent radiation from reaching the surface and into the groundwater. According to our information, two years ago the occupation administrations stopped pumping water from this mine and at the moment radioactive water is already entering the drinking water horizons,” Reznikov said at the Special Kyiv Security Forum on Oct. 23.
He also said that the pumping of water from several dozen other closed mines has been stopped, and environmental standards are being violated at the facilities that are still operating.
“A few more months, and we may have an ecological disaster in occupied territories of Donbas, including in the southern regions of Rostov region,” the deputy prime minister said.
He said that at the beginning of October he met by videoconference with IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi and voiced Ukraine’s request for an examination and sending a monitoring mission of a group of experts from the IAEA to Donbas.
“Surely, today the question of whether the Russian proxies will let the expert group enter these territories is still a question,” the deputy prime minister said.
Reznikov said that the situation is similar in Crimea. “Experts do not exclude that there is a threat of radiation pollution at least in the Azov Sea, and the consequences of an environmental disaster in the north of Crimea will affect not only Ukraine, but the entire Black Sea region: Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Turkey,” he said.
