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Elena Sokolovska’s pink trousers and heat smile distinction with the dusty gear, peeling partitions and lengthy corridors of her laboratory in Odesa, southern Ukraine. We’re on the fifth flooring of the Ukrainian Scientific Centre for Marine Ecology* (UkrNCEM), the place this phytoplankton specialist works alone. For the reason that begin of the battle, most of her colleagues have left the port metropolis. They’re fleeing each bombs and empty coffers, on condition that their state funding has dried up.
With a gradual hand, the biologist picks up water samples taken an hour earlier, and has a final shut take a look at the greenish liquid. It needs to be shipped to Kyiv earlier than 6pm. “The submit workplace lorry won’t watch for us”, she sighs as she slips on her backpack.
Within the capital, the vials will likely be delivered to Alexander Krakhmalny, a nationwide authority on marine biology. He will likely be checking the samples for cyanobacteria, the blue-green microscopic algae that trigger the water to vary color in sure areas of the Black Sea. Some varieties, reminiscent of Nodularia spumigena, are poisonous to people.
Sokolovska sees her day job as a manner of serving to within the battle in opposition to Russia. Earlier than leaving the laboratory, she tersely reminds us: “No photographs of the home windows, please”. A single snap may make the laboratory a straightforward goal for a Russian air assault.
The samples are important proof for documenting “one of many best ecological disasters in Europe since Chernobyl”, as Ukraine’s deputy overseas minister, Andriy Melnyk, has described it. On 6 June 2023, at 2.50 am, the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam on the Dnieper river burst in an explosion later attributed to Russian forces. The 240-kilometre reservoir upstream of the dam contained greater than 18 billion tonnes of water.
A couple of days later, in condemning Russia’s battle crimes, the European Parliament deemed the destruction of the dam to be a case of ecocide. A number of hours after the explosion, the surge of floodwater devastated dozens of villages and prompted the deaths of 58 Ukrainians. Contaminated by fertilisers, gasoline and sewage, the water then spilled into the Black Sea. Ukraine estimates the price of the catastrophe at €3.8 billion.