As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, around EUR 50 billion of damage was caused to the environment. This is what emerged - as Ukrinform reports - in Kharkiv during a meeting of the Committee of the Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian parliament) for environmental policy and nature management.
"We count every tree destroyed. And every hryvnia (Ukrainian currency) that the Russian Federation will pay us for what they did. Every day we continue to record new damage and destruction.
According to preliminary estimates, the total damage to the environment is already more than 2 trillion hryvnia: it includes soil pollution, air pollution, burnt forests and destroyed buildings. Russia is causing a climate crisis, a nuclear crisis, a humanitarian crisis," said Ukraine's First Deputy Minister of Environment and Natural Resources, Ruslan Grechanyk. Oleksandr Filchakov, head of the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor's Office, added: "We record and analyze all crimes in the field of ecology, attacks on industrial facilities, oil deposits."