Russia: Russia said yesterday it will sign an international agreement next month to clean up an Arctic graveyard for Moscow's decommissioned atomic submarines and one of the world's largest dumping grounds of nuclear fuel, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Moscow
The US, EU and Norway will help dispose of the rusting hulks of the Soviet-era submarines and finance a range of projects to clean up the Russian north-west, where much high-tech military hardware has been left to crumble in the decade since the Soviet Union collapsed.
The deputy foreign minister, Mr Vladimir Chizhov, announced plans yesterday for the May 21st signing ceremony in Stockholm, saying the clean-up plan would help attract investment to Arctic Russia and avert potential ecological disaster in a region that was once closed to foreigners because of its military sensitivity.
Mr Chizhov did not give details of the expected investment from donor countries.
Greenpeace and other environmental groups have long campaigned for major investment in the Kola Peninsula, a once beautiful if bleak area, now tainted by industrial development and the dumping of unknown amounts of nuclear fuel from decommissioned atomic submarines.
International attention focused on Russia's north-west when the Kursk atomic submarine sank off Murmansk in August 2000, killing all 118 sailors on board.
Meanwhile, secret KGB archives released in Ukraine yesterday revealed that equipment at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the site of the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster in 1986, was known to be defective.
Published on the Internet site of the Ukrainian secret service SBU (ex-KGB) - www.sbu.gov.ua - the documents mostly concern events surrounding the catastrophe of April 26th, 1986.
The archives contain a letter sent to Moscow on the day of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, in which the Ukrainian KGB chief assured that his men had "taken control of the situation".
On April 26th, 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl plant blew up, releasing a radioactive cloud and contaminating much of Europe. An estimated 15,000 to 30,000 people have died in the aftermath. The plant was finally shut down in 2000 under a $2.3-billion deal with the world's richest nations.
(Additional reporting: AFP)