(It’s paywalled, but here are a few paragraphs from the forbidden zone)
ISPNPP researcher Olena Pareniuk has been in the city of Zhytomyr, around 130 kilometres west of Kyiv, for the past week after being first evacuated to Chernivtsi at the start of the invasion. Before the attack, she was attempting to identify bacteria that could consume radioactive waste within Chernobyl’s destroyed reactor, and she fears that her research will be impossible to resume.
“The truth is that there are still scattered Russian troops in Chernobyl, so scientists and other people who are not military are not allowed there,” she says. “Also, the forests are mined, so it will take a while for us to come back to labs as usual. As for now, all our entrance permissions are stopped until further notice.”
Pareniuk had been studying the microbial diversity of pools of water within the containment building around the destroyed reactor, but these pools have long since disappeared.
“I still have a hope that my samples are in their fridge. It will be impossible to get those biodiversity samples for the second time,” she says. “We were trying to cultivate the specific microorganism that might ‘eat’ lava, concrete and steel constructions inside the arch and spent fuel storage. That might be restored, but it will take a lot of money, time and work.”
Another ISPNPP researcher, Maxim Saveliev, is less optimistic. “We need to start near from zero mostly in all subjects, having people but no data, as all our hard discs have been stolen,” he say
What I thought was “it’s amazing how they keep stressing how this type of weapon is rarely seen in modern battlefields. Except whenever the US or Israel is involved. As if they aren’t always in a war.”
Thread by Kamil Galeev on Belarus, Russia’s smuggling gateway. Galeev says that President Lukashenko is an intelligent and wily politician, much smarter than either Yeltsin or Putin, who has manipulated Putin into propping up his regime by dangling an eventual reunification of Belarus and Russia but never delivering.
Foreign aircraft manufacturers have already “bricked” the planes by withdrawing spare parts and technical support. Maintenance manuals are all online now, and Russian airlines no longer have access. The question now is whether Russian airlines can “hack” their planes by cannibalising parts and doing maintenance on their own.
I have seen even non-right-wingers lament that Finland joining NATO would be provoking further conflict, as if the Russian government giving a speech about how it wanted to invade them somehow didn’t do that already.
Yep. It’s more than obvious now that Putin wants to rebuild the USSR and return it to its old dubious glory, and this time to include Sweden and Finland as logical progressions, given the assumed inertness and no-balls status of the West.
