Eco-solution: Ukrainian court in western Ternopil fines local enterprise $27,000 for polluting river

Western Ternopil commercial court fined the city's water enterprise $27,000 for polluting the local Ikva river, prosecutor's office reports.

The court confirmed evidence of the company discharging pollutants into the river with wastewater in excess of the established standards.

The prosecutor's office demanded to recover damages for excessive discharges into the river.

In the early days of the all-out war, part of a Russian missile hit a livestock waste storage facility near the Ikva river in the Rivne region and caused a fish die-off in the neighboring region. 

The war adds more to the negative consequences for Ukraine's ecology. Activists demand UN institutions and the world authorities recognize "ecocide" as Russia's tool to drain Ukrainian resources and ability to recover from war.

Ukraine's Agrarian Ministry claims 25,000 hectares of fields were flooded in the Kherson region alone, and 100,000 tons of crops were lost due to Russian shelling, fires and the infamous Kakhovka dam explosion.

Farmers in the Mykolaiv region were also affected by the flooding, as 1,050 farmlands were covered by water, and commercial losses for unreceived and unsold crops amounted to $540,000 as of the end of June.

Flooding and crop losses are just the tip of the iceberg. Several large regions were left without irrigation. In terms of numbers, 31 irrigation systems were destroyed, leaving about 30% of the fields in Dnipropetrovsk, 94% in Kherson, and 74% in Zaporizhzhia regions without water.