A month after start of the ecological disaster, caused by the wreck of two Russian tankers with fuel oil, “Crimean speaker” Vladimir Konstantinov decided to get some PR on this occasion after a long pause, announcing the creation of a “coordination group to assist in the elimination of the consequences of the oil spill” in the “state council” under his control.
However, it is impossible to understand how exactly the fake “deputies” can influence the situation, apart from propaganda, since the collaborators obviously do not have any funds in the entirely “subsidized republican budget” to eliminate the disaster.
And therefore, the main consequence of the creation of the “group” was the “parliamentarians” traveling along the coast, taking selfies against the background of bags of dirty sand.
As the “liquidators” of the invaders stated on January 18, in the occupied AR of Crimea, along its entire Black Sea coast from Kerch to the northern Portovoye (Sary-Bulat), “about 6 tons” of pollution were collected in 24 hours, and in Sevastopol “0.4 tons were collected in 24 hours, 4.5 tons were taken away.”
At the same time, the occupiers began to boast about the reduction in the number of dirty birds on the coast, and the aforementioned “liquidators” generally reported on its alleged “cleaning.”
However, on the entire Crimean coast, as of January 19, new emissions of fuel oil continue to be detected, and the reduction in dirty birds has a simple reason: their total number on the coast is not unlimited, and it is not the fuel oil that ends in the sea, but the birds themselves, including rare, endangered species. As, for example, they write on social networks on Sunday, “Yakovenkovo, towards Kerch, the entire beach is rocks. Nothing has been cleaned in two weeks. Lots of fuel oil.”
At the same time, the aggressor’s propaganda is spreading “reassurant” statements from Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, an activist at the Institute of Water Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, that “if the depths are more than 200 meters, nothing should be touched there at all,” and that “in 15-20 years, the bacteria themselves will eat up all the fuel oil.”
Stating that “it is pointless, insanely expensive and senseless to catch traveling clots in the water,” Danilov-Danilyan also cynically states that the sea inhabitants “will die out completely somewhere, but then as the ecosystem recovers, everything will return again,” although he does not specify when this “later” will happen.
However, this activist is forced to admit that “everyone was very late in reacting” and that “there was no one except volunteers for the first week”, and also points out that “only very brave to the point of recklessness citizens can afford to talk about what the beaches will look like at the end of May” and advises “not to trust tour operators who will lure tourists”.
In addition to the “fuel oil baths” themselves, Danilov-Danilyan admits that “where soil is removed in large enough quantities, this will inevitably lead to the processing of the coast. The sea will process it. This will break the entire beach infrastructure”.
And the so-called “honorary president of the Crimean Academy of Sciences” Viktor Tarasenko, recognizing the catastrophic risks of fuel oil pollution for the Sea of Azov, blamed Ukraine for everything, allegedly ignoring “the calls of the scientific community to organize research of the sea area, observations and conduct preventive measures to preserve the species living in it”.
This nonsense about the “insidious hand of Kyiv” is especially tragicomic, given that until 2021, despite the occupation of Crimea and part of the Azov coast of the Donetsk region, the Ukrainian authorities, represented by the State Fisheries Agency, annually signed “protocols” with the Russians on an enslaving bilateral agreement, which dealt precisely with “scientific research of the sea”: if the aggressor had any comments on these papers signed by him, then none of the Russians ever expressed them.
This is understandable, since it was the fake “scientific research” of Azov by the Russians, which Ukraine did not oppose until 2021, that were part of the Kremlin’s further preparations for military and sabotage operations on the Azov Sea, which began in February 2022.
At the same time, the occupiers predictably have no plans to raise the sunken tanker “Volgoneft-212” and the bow of the tanker “Volgoneft-239”, concentrating on extracting fuel oil from the stern of the latter, which was washed ashore on the Temryuk shore.
As of January 19, the “rescuers” from the aggressor were unable to effectively launch the heating system to pump out the fuel oil, since instead of the 45 degrees required for pumping out, the mass in the stern tanks was allegedly heated to 12 degrees.
That is why the occupiers are scooping up the fuel oil that has already leaked out of the tanker with excavators, but if a storm passes in the coming days, new risks from such a “high-tech operation” are obvious.
Among other things, the other day the fuel oil entered the Taman Bay, and the occupiers have not yet been able to count its amount there. The bay is an important ornithological territory of international significance, where “large schools of mullet come every year for feeding and spawning.”
The occupiers are forced to admit that “all this may ultimately affect commercial fish stocks on the northern Black Sea and southern Azov coasts,” but sea fishing in the waters under their control has not been limited in any way. And therefore the ecological catastrophe, caused by the aggressor, is only gaining momentum.
