Putin's stinking new weapon creates a horrific domino effect
Kiev reports that Moscow is deliberately poisoning the important Seym River.
The Seym is 750 kilometers long and originates in Russia. From there, the Seym flows toward Ukraine, where it flows into the Desna. This in turn flows to Kiev, where it is connected to a reservoir that supplies water to millions of people. In Kiev, the Desna then flows into the Dnieper, one of the most important rivers in Europe. Consequently, a polluted Seym can thus have disastrous consequences downstream.
The poisoning was discovered on Aug. 17 and was only now announced. Moscow allegedly deliberately discharged a huge amount of chemical waste from a sugar factory into the river near the border town of Chotkino, with deadly consequences for fauna and flora downstream in Ukraine.
Ammonia, magnesium and other toxic nitrates drastically reduced oxygen levels in the water, crashing the Seym's ecosystem. Dead fish, crayfish and mollusks washed up en masse on the river banks thereafter. And almost all the way to Kiev, meanwhile, the banks would be littered with rotting fish, resulting in a pungent and nasty smell.
“The stench was terrible. You could hardly breathe,” the mayor of Slabyn on the Desna testified to a correspondent of the British newspaper The Guardian. “Everything was dead, from the smallest carp to the biggest catfish.”
The Russians are said to have polluted more than 650 kilometers of river. “Not a single organism has survived. This is unprecedented. This is the first completely dead river in Europe,” echoes The Guardian.
(SR for Tagtik/Source: The Guardian - NBC - Reuters/lllustration picture: Picture by www_kremlin_ru via WikiCommons licensed under the creative commons attribution 4.0 license)