REPORTING. War in Ukraine: two Russian tankers sink in the Black Sea… “The authorities are concerned about the war, not the oil spills”

Meticulously, Svetlana cleans the beak of the black-plumaged bird with a cotton swab, to remove any residue from the fuel oil. The slightest peck in its plumage is enough to have to start this tedious operation again. Then the forty-year-old scolds the bird affectionately, as if it were a toddler. This phalacrocorax is the 115th patient taken care of today by volunteers in this car wash station transformed into an improvised rescue center. Her own children, left in St. Petersburg with their grandparents, this mother only calls when the flow of birds reduces. “The hardest part was New Year’s Eve, very cold. We received more than a thousand birds in a single evening,” she remembers. “There were so many that we almost had no floor space to walk.”

4,000 tonnes of fuel oil spilled

Corpses of dolphins, crabs and red-throated loons, endangered birds, wash up every day on the golden sand that has turned black in Anapa and Crimea, in southeastern Russia. At least 32 dolphins have already been found dead. December 15. The two Russian tankers Volgoneft 239 and Volgoneft 212 were wrecked in the Kerch Strait. These two fifty-year-old ships, designed to sail on calm seas, were caught in a storm. “It feels like a post-apocalyptic film,” notes, bitterly, Uliana, a Muscovite with azure eyes, who, like thousands of other volunteers, came from the four corners of Russia.

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Some 200,000 tonnes of soil could be contaminated by almost 4,000 tonnes of fuel oil spilled into waters, according to the estimate of Minister of Natural Resources Alexander Kozlov. A federal state of emergency has been declared by Moscow, an “ecological disaster”, according to Vladimir Putin.

However, volunteers denounce the insufficient government aid. “Why do we have to shovel the sand stained with fuel oil?” Olga says indignantly, closing her hundredth bag of the day, as she suffers from a severe headache.

“The authorities are just pretending”

She observes with desolation the few bulldozers provided by the authorities, while if the bag is not collected in time, the fuel oil can pass through the plastic and flow back into the sand.
“The authorities must stop trying to ignore the problem and would do better to address it at the federal level, because a disaster of this magnitude cannot be solved with a few shovels,” insists Elena, an ecologist from Sochi, who coordinates the research unit for poisoned birds on the beaches.

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“As soon as it gets warmer, the situation will get worse, since the fuel oil will rise to the surface. We are not only talking about bird life, but also human health: there will be an increase in cancers in this region All the volunteers already drink polysorb (Editor’s note: common remedy in case of poisoning), as one becomes poisoned by breathing fuel oil 24 hours a day. The tourist season in summer is condemned. They don’t care, they just pretend, and sometimes they even make the situation worse.”

Thus, on January 4, volunteers discovered with horror that employees of the Ministry of the Environment released 160 birds in remission, without asking the opinion of ornithologists, while the plumage after cleaning the fuel oil was stripped from its water-repellent grease layer. It no longer protects the bird, which gets wet and drowns. The next day, these birds were found dead. “It makes you want to either give up or go out to demonstrate,” protests Veronica, dark circles under her eyes and messy red hair, after having spent the night searching the beach in search of animals in danger. distress. “All our efforts are just coming to naught!”

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According to Vladimir Slivyak, co-chairman of the environmental organization “Ecozaschita”, there is no hope that the state will devote all its efforts to cleaning up this accident. “The Russian authorities have other tasks to accomplish: they are concerned about the war, not the oil spills,” he explains.