‘It will take 10 years to remove all the rusty barrels…’

As activists hold a massive clean-up in the Russian Arctic, environmental experts warn that the barrels are just a way of masking more pressing environmental problems.

Activists from Russia’s Clean Arctic project reported they have recently collected 4,5 tonnes of rusty old barrels from Chelyuskin Cape, the northernmost point of the Eurasian continent.

In this isolated place with extreme weather, no roads and no running water, the Clean Arctic team spent almost 2,5 months: “All the barrels were put into a net and delivered by helicopter to the Mikhail Somov ship. Next year we plan to remove another 5,000 tonnes of barrels from Chelyuskin in the same way,” Andrey Nagibin, head of the Clean Arctic project, is quoted as saying.

The barrels have been accumulating at Chelyuskin Cape since the 1930s after a Soviet polar research station was opened there.

“Equipment, materials, fuel and much more have been brought to Cape Chelyuskin for almost 90 years,” Roman Ershov, head of Russia’s Northern Meteorological Service, said and called the clean-up operation “epochal”.

The Clean Arctic estimates that it will take 10 years minimum to remove all the rusty barrels from Cape Chelyuskin.

Meanwhile, experts accuse the Clean Arctic project and Russian authorities of masking the true extent of pollution in the Arctic.

Ksenia Vakhrusheva, a project manager with the environmental NGO Bellona, is critical of such a focus on waste collection. According to her, it is a common problem in Russia that the idea of environmental protection is mostly limited to local waste clean-up operations:

“Yes, rusty barrels are very disturbing waste. They look terrible and contaminate the soil. But environmental activity should not be limited to that. There are much bigger environmental problems in the Russian Arctic – for example, a new boom in oil and gas production,” Ksenia told The Barents Observer. “This is because the Russian state’s goal is not to save Arctic nature or the global climate. Its goal is to make as much money as possible to keep the war going”.

According to Ksenia Vakhrusheva, the energy of activists who want to improve the environment is now being diverted to secondary tasks such as cleaning up the barrels. The big issues, such as toxic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from Arctic oil, gas, or coal production, are the number one problem that threatens the planet.

Ksenia, who now lives in Vilnius, Lithuania, regrets that those organizations that have called for stricter environmental controls on oil and gas production in Russia, such as Greenpeace, WWF or Bellona, have been branded ‘undesirable’ or banned in Russia.

Located in Kirkenes, Norway, just a few kilometres from the borders to Russia and Finland, the Barents Observer is dedicated to cross-border journalism in Scandinavia, Russia and the wider Arctic.

As a non-profit stock company that is fully owned by its reporters, its editorial decisions are free of regional, national or private-sector influence. It has been a partner to ABJ and its predecessors since 2016.