KYIV – In what is becoming reminiscent of how long the USSR stayed silent during the Chornobyl disaster of 1986, it took the Russian-occupying Crimean authorities about 10 days to acknowledge a toxic chemical leak in the peninsula’s northern town of Armiansk.
More than 4,000 children and adults have been evacuated, and dozens have sought medical treatment in the border area between Ukraine-controlled Kherson Oblast and the Russia-occupied Ukrainian territory of Crimea since August 23 when sulfur trioxide was released into the air.
Mixed with water, it turns into a vapor that can be transformed into sulfurous acid, a primary agent in acid rain. It can cause harm to respiratory systems, skin irritation and rashes, as well as damage crops, pollute water supplies and erode building materials.
The scope of the human and environmental impact in and beyond the town of 20,000 people still remains unknown.
Ukraine’s military intelligence spokesperson Vadym Skibitsky said that the leak occurred during Russian military exercises not far from the so-called Titan chemical plant. It’s situated on the outskirts of Armiansk 40 miles south of the Kherson administrative border. He didn’t say whether the projectiles that allegedly damaged the premises were stray or had targeted the plant during the military maneuvers.
Yet, local residents in the Kherson Oblast village of Preobrazhenka, near the border with Crimea, started complaining of children suffering from chemical poisoning on August 23-24 while posting pictures on social media.
“The residents of these areas have been in such panic that the shops and pharmacies in their areas had run out of medical masks,” Hromadske International’s correspondent reported from the area on September 6. “The local residents started noticing… a colored fog appear above the city… everything was covered in a rusty film. Leaves began falling from the trees.”
The Russian-backed prime minister of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, first said on August 31 that the chemical plant would not stop operating and that the “acid tanks were urgently being filled with water,” according to the Interfax news wire.
Yet, four days later he stated that harmful substance levels had exceeded the maximum threshold in an emergency statement. Some 4,000 children were subsequently evacuated from the city, the occupation authorities’ health ministry reported.
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A masked boy in Armiansk awaits evacuation following a chemical leak at a titanium dioxide chemical plant in Russia-annexed Crimea that took place on August 23-24, but which the occupying authorities didn’t acknowledge until two weeks afterward.
On the Ukrainian-controlled side in Kherson, 528 children and their parents were evacuated and taken to a regional health resort as of September 8, according to the Kherson Oblast State Administration. Forty-five residents from Crimea had also crossed into Kherson for medical care following the chemical leak, the regional deputy head of the border guard services said the following day.
Additionally two of the three main administrative border crossings between the Kherson region and Crimea were closed.
Meanwhile, 61 Ukrainian border guards have sought medical treatment since the chemical fallout, the security body’s press service said on September 8.
Echo of Chornobyl silence
The Soviet Union also didn’t elaborate on the extent of the disaster during the nuclear fallout at a nuclear power plant in Chornobyl north of Kyiv in 1986. Like the residential reports in Kherson this time around, it took observations by countries as far as Sweden, Finland and Norway – 700 miles away – of abnormally high levels of radioactivity for Moscow to officially announce the accident.
“Still, the Soviets refused to give more details,” The Washington Post reported four days after the fallout on April 30, 1986. “In the United States, a Soviet Embassy official proclaimed: ‘The problem is getting better. It is not out of hand. It is improving. But unfortunately, it is not over yet.’ ”
Ultimately, it took a full week for the Kremlin to provide an account of the nuclear disaster 85 miles north of the Soviet Ukrainian republic’s capital.
Unknown environmental impact
Although Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Foreign Affairs Minister Pavlo Klimkin both have called the chemical leak in Armiansk an “environmental catastrophe,” it’s still not clear whether the situation has been contained or what its effects may be.
The chemical plant was shut down on September 9, according to the Russian state-run news service RIA Novosti.
Kherson authorities on September 11 said that the “situation has normalized,” as the oblast’s governor, Andriy Hordeyev, told Interfax. “We are monitoring the situation with Crimea Titan as for the territory controlled by Ukraine. In the morning of September 10 we do not see that the plant is working. We have certain information, and with a probability of 90 percent we can say that the plant is standing idle.”
Meanwhile, Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry spokeswoman Mariana Betsa said that an appeal will be filed with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons once an inspection is conducted of the chemical pollution.
During a National Security and Defense Council meeting on September 6, President Poroshenko called for an international commission to be formed on the “environmental catastrophe” in order to “stop” it.
And Ukraine’s Crimea prosecutor’s office said it had opened a criminal case on “atmospheric air pollution” on September 4 based on tests taken by a ChemPro-100 chemical detector that showed an “excess of toxic chemical content” in the atmosphere.
Titan chemical plant
Titan is one of Europe’s biggest producers of titanium dioxide, a key component for making plastic and rubber. It also produces mineral fertilizer for agricultural purposes. Before the Russia-instigated Donbas war in early 2014, it was owned by multi-millionaire Ukrainian businessman Dmytro Firtash.
He currently is under house arrest in Austria while fighting extradition charges to the U.S. on suspicion of bribery.
After Moscow invaded Crimea, the plant was renamed to Ukrainian Chemical Products and is now registered to a Russian company. The identity of its current beneficiary owner is unclear because Mr. Firtash was heavily in debt to Russian state-owned Gazprombank, which had bankrolled his consolidation of chemical companies, mostly during Viktor Yanukovych’s truncated presidency of 2010-2014.
It was part of Mr. Firtash’s Group DF holding company that is registered in Austria, along with many of his other companies.