Toxic Industries in War-time Donbas.

 Long before hostilities broke out in 2014, the coal-producing Donbas region was among the heaviest industrialised areas of imperial Russia, the former USSR and later independent Ukraine. By the beginning of the conflict the area was home to thousands of industrial facilities, including 130 heavy ones such as metal smelting or chemical production. Heavy industry in the Donbas region is severely impacted by the conflict. Factors including the fighting itself, difficulties with the supply of raw materials, water, and energy, and severe logistical challenges combined to make the working environment utterly unsafe. Enterprises were shelled, and in times of heavy fighting, certain staff had to live on the premises. Based on open source information, production at almost 250 enterprises was compromised in one way or another, and more than 80% of the compromised facilities have high or very high levels of potential environmental risk. Today many Donbas industries no longer work at full capacity or at all, yet hazardous facilities and materials remain. Thus, as long as arms are being fired and politics stays unsettled there are toxic risks.

With relatively high industrial safety and emergency response standards and a professional and dedicated workforce, luckily no environmental disaster has happened so far. Yet the documented cases of perforated chlorine pipelines, shelled dams containing industrial tailings, and overflowing manure storage ponds are a disaster waiting to happen. Avdiivka Coke Plant is the biggest of its kind in Europe. It is located less than ten kilometres, within artillery shelling range, from the line of contact, on the side controlled by Ukraine. Since the beginning of active military action in 2014-2015, landmines have been placed in the area and the enterprise was continuously shelled. As Olexiï Bobyr, the plant’s head of production told journalists during the 2019 conflict-environment press-tour in Donbas:

More than 300 shells landed in the plant premises, only one production unit was not hit. After a shell hit benzene tanks it took three days to put out the fire. Supply lines, including the plant’s gas pipelines, were hit too. Twelve workers died, including two while working. With water, gas, and electricity supplies frequently cut off, the plant was forced to invest in alternative electricity supply lines via a safe zone. The enterprise is active today and operates several tailing storage facilities. One of them, no longer used but never cleaned up, contains more than 400,000 tonnes of highly toxic chemical waste. Shooting continues despite persistent political attempts to settle the conflict, while landmines prevent proper environmental monitoring. As highlighted in a recent study of several Donbas tailing dams, if something goes wrong the risk of a ‘domino effect’ can be dramatic, in the worst imaginable case reaching as far as the Sea of Azov. Some areas during conflict can be considered a tinderbox, ready to spark and envelope their surroundings in flames. But others, including those in which heavy industry operates, are more like a gunpowder magazine, at risk of enormous compound social and environmental effects.