World

It began as a normal shift at Chernobyl for Oleksiy Shelestiy but as night turned to day on February 24, distant artillery fire and the arrival of Russian troops changed everything.

More than 100 employees, who had arrived at the defunct nuclear plant for their night shift just hours earlier, were now trapped as Russian forces crossed into Ukraine and seized swathes of land on their way towards Kyiv. 

The capture of Chernobyl by Russian forces kicked off a weeks-long ordeal that saw power briefly cut at the facility and employees carefully monitored by the invaders.

“We were not mentally prepared for this,” Shelestiy told AFP. “But we had no way out.”

As a night shift supervisor, Shelestiy oversaw a team of nearly a dozen people charged with monitoring electricity supplies at Chernobyl, where a massive sarcophagus covers the remains of a destroyed nuclear reactor to prevent radioactive contamination. 

The plant was the site in 1986 of the world’s worst nuclear accident. Since then, it has been maintained by thousands of Ukrainian workers and closely monitored by international experts to contain its radioactive waste. 

For years, a carefully executed shift schedule and monitoring network kept a close eye on radiation levels at the facility. Then Russian forces poured across the border from Belarus and seized Chernobyl, holding its workers captive and cutting it off from the world. 

“I understood that an accident was possible,” Shelestiy recalled.

“Emotional and psychological pressure did not allow me to focus on this. We just tried to do our job and tried to control all the parameters so that nothing could happen.”

– Power struggle –

The most harrowing period of the occupation began on March 9, when power was cut to the plant due to nearby fighting, Shelestiy said.

Experts acknowledged there would be no repeat of the 1986 meltdown in the absence of a working reactor on the grounds. But electricity is nonetheless vital to power the security infrastructure, including the cooling systems for the spent nuclear fuel storage facility.

For days, the workers relied first on their diesel supplies and later fuel provided by the Russians until they were able to re-route power through the Belarus grid. 

All the while, the Ukrainians trapped at the plant were only able to catch snippets of what was happening outside Chernobyl by listening to radio broadcasts and through occasional calls back home on one of the plant’s landlines.

The staff were not able to return home and became increasingly drained. That risked compromising their ability to fulfil their safety and security duties.

“It was mentally and emotionally difficult,” Shelestiy explained. 

Employees were also closely watched and forced to navigate a dizzying network of checkpoints set up by the Russians on the plant’s grounds — hindering basic movements and maintenance at the facility. 

Ukrainian authorities have since accused the Russians of showing wanton disregard for basic safety during their occupation of Chernobyl, saying its soldiers dug trenches and set up camps in contaminated areas of the facility that had received heavy doses of radiation.

“They dug bare soil contaminated with radiation, collected radioactive sand in bags for fortification, breathed this dust,” said Energy Minister German Galushchenko in April, claiming the Russian forces had been exposed to a “shocking” amount of radiation. 

“Every Russian soldier will bring a piece of Chernobyl home. Dead or alive,” the minister added.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, later said “an increase in the levels” of radiation had been recorded at Chernobyl but insisted the matter was under control. 

“The situation is not one that could be judged as posing a great danger to the environment and to people at the moment we were taking these measures,” he added.

Shelestiy was unable to confirm details about alleged Russian misconduct at Chernobyl, where he was mostly forced to remain at his workstation and had little interaction with their troops.  

– ‘Worried, nervous’ –

Amid the uncertainty, Shelestiy said he tried to console his team, whose families in the nearby town of Slavutych had been largely surrounded by Russian forces. 

Back in Slavutych, mayor Yuriy Fomichev walked a fine line, managing relations with Russian forces, helping smuggle supplies into the besieged community and comforting the families of the captive workers.

“I had to calm them down and explain that it was necessary to be patient,” said Fomichev. 

Built in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident as a settlement for evacuated families who had been living near the plant in 1986, Slavutych was one of the last purpose-made towns constructed from scratch during the final days of the Soviet Union. 

For many of its residents, seeing chaos engulf Chernobyl again was an unwelcome case of deja-vu. 

“We were worried, nervous,” said Tamara Shyrobokova, 75, a former Chernobyl employee who was resettled in Slavutych following the meltdown.

“I was literally shocked by the fact that Russia attacked Ukraine. No-one could ever imagine this,” she added.

The whole episode also perplexes Shelestiy. He was released following a round of negotiations days before the Russians retreated, after their troops were routed in the battle for Kyiv. 

“They said they were trying to free me from something but I don’t understand from what,” said Shelestiy. “I can’t understand it.”

The population of endangered Saiga antelopes in Kazakhstan is now over 1.3 million, the ecology ministry said Tuesday, in the latest boost to a species threatened by poaching and disease.  

In 2015, around 200,000 of the antelopes — well over half the total global population at the time — were wiped out by what scientists later determined was a nasal bacterium that spread in unusually warm and humid conditions.

But last year brought good news as the numbers rebounded from 334,000 in 2019 to 842,000 across the centre, west and northwest of the vast Central Asian state. 

The April aerial count ahead of this year’s spring calving took the population to 1,318,000, according to a dataset shared with AFP by the ecology ministry.  

The former Soviet country’s vast steppe is home to a majority of the world’s Saiga with Russia’s Kalmykia region and Mongolia hosting smaller numbers.

Poaching is a persistent threat to the Saiga, known for its distinctive bulbous nose, and is fuelled by demand for their horn in traditional Chinese medicine.

Kazakhstan’s leaders pledged to intensify their crackdown on poaching after two state rangers were killed by poachers in 2019.

But the success of conservation efforts have raised fears that Kazakhstan will once again allow hunting, with a ban introduced in the late 1990s running out in 2023. 

A key UN summit this year must give biodiversity the same priority as climate change and press ahead with putting a financial value on natural resources, Gabon’s environment minister says.

British-born Lee White, an ecologist who has helped make Gabon a powerful voice for the environment in central Africa, said Earth’s climate and biodiversity crises went hand in hand.

COP15 — an eagerly awaited conservation conference due to take place in Kunming, China, in the last quarter of 2022 — must give biodiversity “the same level of priority as climate change”, White said in an interview with AFP.

“We’re looking at much higher ambition for conservation,” he said.

“One of our priorities is the 30 by 30 target — 30 percent protected areas across the planet by 2030 — and moving the agenda forward on biodiversity credits, biodiversity financing.”

Carbon credits, which have been around for more than two decades, offer financial incentives to reduce or avoid emissions of greenhouse gases.

Biodiversity credits would offer similar incentives to nurture conservation hotspots, which scientists say play a hugely under-estimated role in human survival.

“The Congo Basin stabilises Africa, it’s the heart and lungs of Africa,” said White, the author of dozens of research papers.

“Without the Congo Basin… we lose the rainfall in the Sahel, and you have hundreds of millions of climate refugees moving south,” he said.

“We should be able to calculate that cost and then attribute it to the biodiversity services that the Congo Basin is providing. But today, biodiversity is worth zero.”

Born in Manchester in northern England, White, 56, began his career in the African rain forests before he managed the activities of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Gabon for 15 years and in 2002 became an advisor to President Omar Bongo Ondimba for national parks and eco-tourism. In 2009, he was appointed minister for water, forests, the sea and environment.

– Gabon success –

White pointed to Gabon’s own record in sequestering carbon by preserving its lush tropical forests.

In 2002, Gabon set up a network of 13 national parks covering 11 percent of its territory. Today, 22 percent of the land is protected.

In 2017, the country created 20 marine sanctuaries covering 53,000 square kilometres (20,500 square miles) — the biggest ocean haven in Africa, and equivalent to 27 percent of its territorial waters.

“Since the Earth summit in Rio we have absorbed three billion tonnes of CO2,” said White.

“I think if we find ways to give a value to all of that progress, if we find a way to find a value to our net sequestration of carbon, then other countries will maybe take a look at the Gabon example and potentially do something similar themselves.”

Habitat conservation has helped Gabon’s population of forest elephants grow from 60,000 to 95,000 animals, while across Africa numbers of this species have fallen by three-quarters.

This success story has a downside in conflict between elephants and humans, in which climate change also plays a part, said White.

– Hungry elephants –

Research at one of the forest sites, he said, has found that over 40 years, temperatures have risen by one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) and annual rainfall has fallen by 200 millimetres (7.9 inches), leading to a crash of 80 percent in rainforest fruits, which are a key part of the elephants’ diet.

“The elephants are hungry — we’ve actually proved scientifically that they are thinner,” said White. 

“So they are coming out of the forest as well because of climate change to eat people’s fields, looking for food.”

White said he had much sympathy for poor farmers who were exasperated by elephants which ate or trampled on their crops.

“The world loves elephants,” he said.

“I would bet there are more elephants in Paris or London than there are in the whole of Africa. But those elephants are cuddly elephants — they’re toy elephants in children’s bedrooms.

“Because for the West, the elephant is this wonderful lovely cuddly thing, and for rural African children, an elephant is a big scary thing that might have just killed their father or destroyed the food that they were going to eat in the next few months.”

White said it was essential to resolve poaching in remote areas so that elephants could move away from areas inhabited by humans and back into their old habitat.

“We (also) have to protect rural people’s crops, ideally using electric fences and other methods, rather than killing the elephants,” he said.

“But we absolutely have to protect rural people’s livelihoods and safety and quality of life.”

This year, for the first time, the government has provided funds to help ease the elephant-human conflict, he said.

The equivalent of $5 million has been included in the 2022 budget for compensation for farmers whose crops have been damaged by tuskers.