Dzharylhach Island steppe has been on fire for five days due to Russian hostilities – Ukrainian ecologists

Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group has posted a report stating the most valuable steppe area in Dzharylhach National Nature Park has been on fire for five days.

The area has been under Russian occupation since the first days of the full-scale aggression, so the special administration of the national park cannot ensure its preservation.

The area burning for five days is a zone of absolute protection in the national park, where even human visits are restricted, activists noted. 

The main part of all steppe ecosystems of the island is concentrated here (the rest of the territory is swampy to varying degrees or is periodically flooded) and the population of all rare steppe animals on the island.

The island is home to the largest number of hoofed animals. This area received the protection status as a reserve back in 1974, 35 years before the creation of the national park.

Nature conservationists are convinced that the fire, which no one is trying to put out, will cause "colossal losses" to the island's biodiversity.

Recently, the AFU General Staff reported that Russians had created a man-made spit connecting Dzharylhach Island with the Kherson mainland. The report says the invaders covered the ferry to the island with sand near the village of Lazurne.

Russian troops use the reserve to base their troops and equipment to support the defense lines, actively breached by Ukrainian forces.

Is it possible to create a man-made spit that will turn the island into a peninsula? Satellite images from previous years show that the gap appeared and disappeared again in different years, long before Russian forces showed up in the Kherson region.

Rubryka appealed to ecologists to find out and put it all together: what is wrong with Dzharylhach?