The Ukraine war on our doorstep is a constant threat. Contaminated drinking water is a dangerous new twist
I
n the second week of March, the nature vlogger Ilie Cojocari went out to film the arrival of spring on the Nistru (Dniester) river, 70 metres away from his home in Naslavcea, a village bordering Ukraine on the northernmost point of Moldova. But as he approached the river he could smell the stench of oil rising up from the water and see dark spots floating on its surface. Something was wrong.
Two days earlier, Russia had attacked Ukraine’s Novodnistrovsk hydropower complex 15 miles upriver. Cojocari had been kept awake all night by the sound of shelling. “No one slept in the [Moldovan] district of Ocniţa that night,” he told me.
There was no official information from either the Ukrainian or Moldovan governments on the oil spill into the river when Cojocari went filming along its banks. But soon after posting his footage, he received calls from the Chișinău ministry of the environment asking him to confirm that the footage was real.
