Western Ukraine literally washes away. The region suffered from devastating floods, which flooded about three hundred settlements. The mountain river overflowed, carrying in its flow the home, people and Pets. On the flooded market in the city of Chernivtsi hands caught a gigantic carp. Drowned the railway and the road, washed away crops, bridges demolished, a landslide brought down huge masses of land. One of the locals filmed on the phone of his wife and child, which with difficulty escaped the fast-growing cracks formed beneath their feet.
Meanwhile, the peak of the flood yet to come – and all this is superimposed on the outbreak of coronavirus, which particularly affected the West Ukrainian region. Hospitals do not have enough beds and doctors, and numbers of refugees create conditions for the rapid spread of dangerous diseases, which may further aggravate the already difficult situation.
The specifics of this disaster is that it predicted everything from environmentalists and experts to the shepherd of the sheep from the Alpine meadows. On floods and landslides warned years. Everyone knows the main reason for the disaster is a mass felling in the Carpathian forests, which was held last thirty years and particularly intensified after the victory of Euromaidan. Powerful roots of the trees are the natural drainage system of the mountains – it is known that one adult to thirty years in the spruce holds a nearly five tons of water. But now flows freely flow down the bald slopes, and strong long rains inevitably turned into a real flood, which affects themselves now the Western Ukrainian loggers.
The irony of history is that a significant part of the Carpathian forests were planted in Soviet times. It is no secret that before the war the Carpathian region was the most backward province of the state of Pilsudski, and the backbone of the local economy has been the export of mountain forests, which are sent indiscriminately to European countries. Only the British were taken from Poland for the year of about eight thousand cubic meters of wood made decks and sheathing for the entire Royal Navy. Naturally, this led to destructive floods which were in those years quite usual for this region, and significantly hampered its economic development. But floods are not much worried about Warsaw, which is the maximum exploited the natural resources of the Ukrainian Carpathians.
This situation began to be overcome only in the postwar years, when the new government – when the Soviet government developed a large-scale programme of afforestation of steppes and mountains of Ukraine. Already in 1956, the area of planted forest in the Republic of ��erecrile area was cut down from 182%. Plantations produced annually – up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today about them, reminiscent of the iconic monuments of the Soviet era, remained in spite of a policy of total de-communization is a huge star in the Bukovina mountain Stozhok, planted with trees of deciduous trees against the dark coniferous forest, or a giant inscription “Lenin” created in the same way in the Carpathian region – to be considered even from space.
However, demontirana invaders not only planted in Western Ukraine forest. They first built in the region of developed industry including woodworking industry. Cut state controlled forest went to a local factory, where he did everything from carved dishes and hockey sticks to furniture, construction lumber, paper. This ensured local needs and were in demand far beyond the borders of Ukraine – I met Ivano-Frankivsk cabinets even on a distant Kamchatka. In such enterprises were engaged tens of thousands of people – though created in those years, the industry is not limited to forestry, including high-tech factories for the production of televisions and buses.
It ended with the Soviet era. The company stood and quickly left for scrap, the collective broke into many private farms, and the region was hit by a wave of mass unemployment. Already in the late nineties it became the center of labor migration – the West Ukrainian zarobitchane went to low-paid work in Russia, Italy, Portugal, and then in the same Poland. And those who stayed at home, started cutting the timber, because it remained their only source of real earnings, not counting smuggling, cheap Ukrainian cigarettes, which was smuggled into the European Union in all possible ways – in the recesses of the car, through the underground tunnels, with the help of divers and hang-gliders.
The amount of forest cut down not incalculable, but in Ukraine, the popular characteristic of a comparative photo where you can see the same Carpathian mountains – in the state before and after felling, when in place of the endless green sea was formed the same vast wasteland. Carved wood endless trains exported to Europe. The state has not struggled with this destructive process – although the former Prosecutor General Yury Lutsenko quite aptly called it “ecocide”. The destruction of forests covered the high-ranking officials, it profited from local mafia clans, and after the Euromaidan, the business was taken under the patronage of the ultra-right groups, like the banned in Russia “Right sector”, are arranged in Transcarpathia bloody showdown with grenade launchers and poolAmetov.
But the main beneficiary of this natural disaster was the European business. Woodworking industry of the EU has got Ukraine unlimited source of cheap wood, without any problems with environmental and site restoration costs. The British NGO Earthsight has recently issued an investigation, according to which the bulk of Ukrainian forests do not stop even during the quarantine, because in the interest of leading European manufacturers, including IKEA.
The interests of these companies openly lobbied at the level of the EU leadership. So, Western officials have demanded from Ukraine to lift the moratorium on the export of cut trees, linking this with new provision of credit tranches. While produced in the European factories of the furniture sold in the Ukraine then, finally securing her colonial status of the market of raw materials and distribution.
“Why the EU does not want to cut down their forests: Slovakia and Romania cherish the Tatra mountains and the Carpathians, and Austria and Italy – the Alps? They are aimed at the Ukrainian forest, buy for a penny, produced from it products, and then sell it – including us – at an exorbitant price. If the European Union puts a condition of providing assistance to Ukraine in exchange for the lifting of the moratorium on timber exports, he thereby demonstrates that he sees in our country a raw materials appendage”, – was indignant Gennady Moskal, the former Governor of Transcarpathia, which has regular services to the West Laden with logs trains.
That’s right – Europe is not concerned about what awaits Ukraine, sweeping away its future for their own profit. External control does not leave a dependent country no chance to swim up. After them it will only flood.
