Occupiers admit failure to eliminate fuel oil spill in Crimea
The Russian-installed governor of occupied Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhayev, announced that the city budget has already allocated 78 million rubles (approximately 780,000 US dollars) to address pollution from the fuel oil spill. He emphasized that this is the most expensive expenditure so far and admitted that these funds would likely not be sufficient. The so-called “head of Crimea,” Sergey Aksyonov, even made veiled criticisms of the Russian authorities, stating that the situation would continue to worsen until the wrecked tankers were recovered.
A month after the Russian tankers crashed, representatives of Crimea’s occupation administration have admitted they cannot handle the scale of the environmental disaster. Their earlier bravado about allegedly having the situation under control has disappeared.
The inaction of the occupation authorities has allowed the environmental disaster in the Black Sea to escalate to alarming levels. Its consequences will take years to mitigate, and the responsibility for this lies entirely with Russia.
