ECOLOGICAL SITUATION IN UKRAINE

It’s common knowledge that Ukraine is an industrial and intensively farmed country so it contains some of the most polluted lands in Eastern Europe. Pollution is especially severe in many of the densely populated areas of Ukraine like Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donets’k, Dnipropetrovs’k, and Zaporizhia. Other Ukrainian cities with major chronic air pollution problems include Kyiv, Komunars’k, Makiivka, and Odessa. It also should be mentioned that the matter of great concern is the condition of environment in the Crimea, one of the most beautiful areas of our country. There are great chemical plants in Simferopol’, Saky, Krasnoperekops’k, Armians’k and an oil refinery in Kerch. Isn’t it too much for a health-resort zone? It took years of public protest to stop the construction of the Crimean nuclear power plant.

One of the most burning environmental issues in Ukraine is air pollution. Coal-using industries, such as metallurgical coke-chemical plants, steel mills, and thermal power plants are major sources of high levels of uncontrolled emissions into the atmosphere.

One more urgent problem in Ukraine is water pollution. Almost all surface waters of Ukraine belong to the Black Sea and the Sea of Asov basins. The high population density, heavy industrial development and relatively low freshwater endowment of those basins, have given rise to the chronic and serious levels of water pollution. The Dnister and Danube belong to the most polluted water bodies. One of the areas suffering most from serious and chronic coastal water pollution is the sea of Asov. It has experienced serious problems of industrial and municipal waste-water contamination and increased levels of salinity since the early 1970s.                 A primary cause of the sea’s ecological deteriorating has been the diversion for the purposes of irrigation (up to 80 percent) of fresh but not necessarily pure water inflow from the Don and the Kuban rivers. As a result, the sea’s salinity has been increased by more than 40 percent since the 1950s.

Nuclear contamination has affected the air, land and water of Ukraine as well as vast areas beyond it. These areas are contaminated by various radioactive isotopes such as caesium-137, iodine-131, strontium-90, and plutonium-240. Who knows what possible affects on health or longer term generic effects this contamination may have. No doubt, drastic measures have to be undertaken to neutralize its perilous effect.