Environmental crimes in the occupied Crimea: a report sent to the UN

The occupiers are systematically destroying the environment in Crimea.

A message about this is posted on the website of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center.

Human rights activists estimate that the peninsula's nature has been damaged by three trillion hryvnias.

The report notes that Russians conduct military exercises in nature reserves, cut down forests, poison the soil, and illegally extract resources. It adds that due to the actions of the Russian Federation, some ecosystems have been lost forever.

The CTRC proposes the following ways out of this situation: to strengthen international monitoring of human rights and biodiversity in the occupied territories of Ukraine; to support the efforts of civil society organizations in documenting human rights violations and environmental crimes; to ensure the participation of indigenous peoples in the formation of environmental policy, in particular in the preservation of culturally significant landscapes; to integrate traditional indigenous knowledge into biodiversity conservation programs in compliance with the FPIC principle (free, prior and informed consent);

Environmentalists from mainland Ukraine, although they "estimated" the damage at three trillion hryvnias, suggest that the amount could be much higher, as part of the peninsula is inaccessible to study because it is mined and occupied.

As a reminder, we wrote about how the occupiers have been collecting oil in the Kerch Strait for more than three years, which spilled out at the beginning of the full-scale invasion after the accident of two Russian tankers.

Олександра Горст