Around 5 p.m. on Tuesday, March 5, a fire broke out in Kyiv's Osokorky Ecopark, engulfing about 3 hectares of reeds and grass in the Osokorky Meadows and Tyagle Lake reserves.
30 rescuers using drones, a swamp truck, and other special equipment extinguished the fire for about 7 hours, until midnight, the Kyiv City State Administration reports.
It is noted that at first the fire covered about 500 square meters of the territory, but later the scale of the fire increased.
Deputy Head of the Kyiv City State Administration Volodymyr Prokopiv and representatives of the Department of Environmental Protection and Climate Change Adaptation of the Kyiv City State Administration asked the police to investigate the circumstances of the fire and, if arson is established, to bring the perpetrators to justice.
"It is still too early to draw conclusions, but it is already clear that enormous damage has been caused to the environment," Oleksandr Vozniy, head of the Department of Ecology and Natural Resources of the KMDA, wrote.
Eco-activists suspect that the fire is related to the scandalous developer Stolitsa Group, because the fire occurred on a site adjacent to the building, which is protected by volunteers.
The community noted that recently activists were threatened. So unknown people wrote in their chat about arson, but then deleted the message. Activists suggest that the pallia destroyed all living things to make it easier to expand construction later.
"To the argument "there is no nature there, everything has burned down there, let there be better houses" 3, 2, 1," wrote Ksenia Semenova, a member of the Kyiv City Council. "The community is suspicious of the commissioned actions of the developer Stolitsa Group, which is trying to destroy and build 200 hectares of the last green zone in Osokorki."
She emphasized that in Kyiv, fires systematically occur in protected areas and in historical buildings.
Program coordinator of the European Climate Fund in Ukraine, Iryna Stavchuk, emphasized that the ecopark could become a modern natural park and place of wildlife. This is especially relevant for such densely built-up neighborhoods as Poznyaki and Osokorky.
"There is nothing for people to breathe in those Poznyaks and, apart from the high-rises and yards parked by cars, there is nowhere to catch the eye. But no, we need to build the last pockets of nature and places for recreation," she wrote.
Earlier, EcoPolitic wrote, that a construction waste dump has been set up on the coast of Kyiv in the Tyahle Lake landscape reserve. Previously, a large area of the lake was covered with construction waste and a road was being built across it.
As EcoPolitic previously reported, Volodymyr Boreiko, director of the Kyiv Ecological and Cultural Center, said that over the past 3 years, developers have attempted to attack protected areas in Kyiv 10 times.
