Ukraine: Ukraine Is in an Environmental Crisis Too

Mar 3, 2022 | Gregory Barber and Matt Simon, Wired
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In the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the ground has been behaving strangely. In some places, it is sinking; elsewhere it “heaves”—bulging upward, according to satellite data released this week. Before it became a conflict zone, the Donbas has long been Ukraine’s coal country, and the earth is riddled with hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath cities, factories, and farms, many of them abandoned. Recently, those shafts have been flooding, causing the surface to shift and carrying toxic chemicals that now threaten the region’s water supply. One of those mines, the site of a nuclear test in the 1970s, remains potentially radioactive. Ukrainian scientists have warned that the risks to the region could be “more deep and dangerous than Chernobyl.”