On February 16, the aggressor-controlled “media” published rather characteristic semi-confessions of the Sevastopol collaborator, former Corresponding Member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Sergei Konovalov, who has been declared by the occupiers as the “director” of the “Marine Hydrophysical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences” since 2016.
This figure, a year and a half after the disaster, stated that after the explosion of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station in 2023, “Rospotrebnadzor specialists” demanded that his “institute” conduct “research” on the “ingestion of potentially dangerous substances into the Black Sea” and allegedly “considered the possibility of closing the resort season in Crimea.”
Let us recall, that immediately after the Russian troops blew up the Kakhovka HPP dam, the aggressor not only baselessly accused Ukraine of this international crime, but also almost immediately, without waiting for any “research”, declared that allegedly “no damage to Crimea is expected”, precisely for its annual “resort” propaganda about “millions of vacationers”.
At the same time, Konovalov now admits that “a huge volume of water that broke through the dam rushed rapidly downstream of the Dnieper and was dumped into the northern part of the Black Sea shelf.
This led to an environmental disaster, since the bottom sediments of the Kakhovka reservoir and the lower reaches of the Dnieper contained many harmful impurities – from radioactive isotopes left over from the Chernobyl accident to heavy metals and toxic substances used in industry and agriculture.”
Konovalov also admitted that “even if the water flow did not contain pollutants, its impact on the marine ecosystem could still be negative due to abrupt changes in the salt balance.”
This collaborator immediately made a “reservation” that allegedly “research conducted by oceanographers showed that polluted waters will not reach the shores of the peninsula.”
However, Konovalov’s current narrative is internally contradictory precisely in terms of “harmlessness for Crimea.” After all, as follows from the satellite images he published for June 9-10, 2023, the pollution caused by the explosion of the hydroelectric power station allegedly concentrated in the Odessa Gulf, and then went along the coast to the west.
And this is quite logical, since the currents in this part of the Black Sea go counterclockwise, but after this mass of water passed to the mouth of the Danube and to the coast of Romania, a significant part of it inevitably turned east and followed along the shelf, just within the framework of those same currents, to the coast of Western Crimea, including all the pollution described by Konovalov.
The current semi-confessions of Konovalov are interesting not only because the occupiers have stated the fact of an environmental catastrophe, but also because the “Marine Hydrophysical Institute” “headed” by him was clearly preparing a scientific “justification” for the same “Rospotrebnadzor”, which obviously was the last to plan to “close the Crimean beaches”, but at the same time clearly wanted some kind of “expert cover” for fulfilling the Kremlin’s demands to ignore the risks.
The reasons why the occupiers’ propaganda has now put Konovalov “on the air” are most likely connected with the probable international processes on the current Volgoneft tanker disaster.
The occupiers, among other things, have a duty to study the situation of environmental risks and report on it, including to interested third Black Sea countries. It is extremely likely that the current “inconvenient questions” have also raised the “legacy” of the 2023 disaster, and now the aggressor is hastily imitating “conducted research and monitoring of the situation”, possibly retroactively.
