The Russian occupiers deliberately set fire to the forests, in particular, to reveal the positions of the Ukrainian military.
Sometimes UAV operators cannot see anything because of the smoke from fires, reports Ministry of the Interior on Facebook.
“The forest is on fire, everything is on fire, it burns out. Where there are hostilities, the earth is simply burned there. If you don’t extinguish, then everything will burn out, and if you extinguish, you are already a target,” said Valery, UAV operators of the National Guard.
Lawyer of the human rights organization "Ecology. Law. Man" Anatoly Pavelko explained that extinguishing fires is the most serious problem. After all, the elimination of fire should occur during shelling in mined areas.
He stressed that the Russians deliberately set fire to the forests in order to reveal the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and push the military back. Unintentional fires also occur due to shelling or careless handling of fire.
Pavelko added that in the east of Ukraine, the forests are mostly coniferous, that is, they suffer greatly from fires.
Alexey Prikhodko, director of the Limansky forestry enterprise, noted that in 2022, fires damaged about 6.5 thousand hectares of forests, that is, a third of the entire forestry. Now this ecosystem is completely destroyed, and it will take 20-40 years to restore it.
The report stressed that due to forest fires, the level of groundwater began to change. Swamps began to appear in some places, and the water level in some lakes began to rise sharply. The consequences of the destruction of forests in the Donetsk region in the future will be felt in neighboring regions. The entire South-East of Ukraine will increasingly be covered by dust storms from Central Asia.
Earlier, EcoPolitic wrote, that in the Donetsk region, the invaders turned the Yampol forestry into ruins, in particular, shelling destroyed administrative buildings, damaged trees and formed craters from direct hits.
As EcoPolitic reported earlier, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has begun work on developing a program to raise funds for the restoration of Ukrainian forestry.
