The Dramatic Impact of Illegal Amber Mining in Ukraine’s Wild West

A chaotic scene in Ukraine has miners pitted against each other and the government, often with deadly consequences and significant environmental harm. Vlad’s black SUV softly crunched through the gravel in front of Dubrovytsya’s faded Polish Catholic church. The sound of circular saws echoed from inside, where workmen were restoring the 300-year-old rococo cathedral to its pre-Soviet glory—allegedly with money from the illicit amber trade. Stas, Vlad’s partner, parked his BMW a couple blocks away. The former cops popped the trunk of Vlad’s 4×4 and he pulled out a shotgun. He grabbed a few shells and put the gun in the back of our truck. “We’re always armed when we go out,” said the illegal amber miner. And for good reason—the town sits in the heart of Ukraine’s Wild West—the thousands of acres of ravaged pine and birch forests whose sandy soils hide millions of dollars in amber. As in other gold rushes, violence has followed the scramble for the semiprecious gemstone, with gangs fightingover lucrative pits and claims rife that corrupt government officials are battling for territory and control. On January 15, assailants armed with machine guns and grenades attacked young men in a coffee shop in the town of Olevsk, killing one and seriously wounding around a dozen others. Pictures from the scene show blood and handguns splashed across the snow. The rush is built on the backs of tens of thousands of poor villagers as they illegally blast apart the landscape with pressure hoses, digging from the loose earth of northwest Ukraine the brown lumps of fossilized tree resinmade famous in Jurassic Park. On our way out of town we passed a modest showroom selling legal jewelry and Orthodox icons encrusted in the finished product—polished bits of amber gleaming from buttery yellow to clear dark honey. Nearby, a row of shops sold home furnishings and construction supplies as people rush to use the money from the bonanza to fix up their small homes or build new ones. The banditry is so widespread it has become a sort of dark joke—a wink, a nudge and a Kalashnikov. One building contractor’s sign read, “We will be your roof,” a play on “krysha,” Russian for “roof,” but slang for “protection racket.”

Read more: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/01/illegal-amber-mining-ukraine/

Posted by admin on Feb 5 2017. Filed under News at Now. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry