Wednesday, August 27, 2025

"From Kyiv to the Suwałki Gap, bogs return as Europe’s defensive shield"

A topic we've looked at a couple times, links after the jump.

From Politico.eu, August 26:

Restoring the EU’s drained bogs would stop both Russian tanks and planet-warming pollution.  

In February 2022, as Russia marched on Kyiv, Oleksandr Dmitriev realized he knew how to stop Moscow’s men: Blow a hole in the dam that strangled the Irpin River northeast of the capital and restore the long-lost boggy floodplain.

A defense consultant who organized offroad races in the area before the war, Dmitriev was familiar with the terrain. He knew exactly what reflooding the river basin — a vast expanse of bogs and marshes that was drained in Soviet times — would do to Russia’s war machinery. 

“It turns into an impassable turd, as the jeep guys say,” he said. He told the commander in charge of Kyiv’s defense as much, and was given the go-ahead to blow up the dam. 

Dmitriev’s idea worked. “In principle, it stopped the Russian attack from the north,” he said. The images of Moscow’s tanks mired in mud went around the world. 

Three years later, this act of desperation is inspiring countries along NATO’s eastern flank to look into restoring their own bogs — fusing two European priorities that increasingly compete for attention and funding: defense and climate. 

That’s because the idea isn’t only to prepare for a potential Russian attack. The European Union’s efforts to fight global warming rely in part on nature’s help, and peat-rich bogs capture planet-warming carbon dioxide just as well as they sink enemy tanks. 

Yet half of the EU’s bogs are being sapped of their water to create land suitable for planting crops. The desiccated peatlands in turn release greenhouse gases and allow heavy vehicles to cross with ease. 

Some European governments are now wondering if reviving ailing bogs can solve several problems at once. Finland and Poland told POLITICO they were actively exploring bog restoration as a multipurpose measure to defend their borders and fight climate change. 

Poland’s massive 10 billion złoty (€2.3 billion) Eastern Shield border fortification project, launched last year, “provides for environmental protection, including by … peatland formation and forestation of border areas,” the country’s defense ministry said in a statement. 

“It’s a win-win situation that achieves many targets at the same time,” said Tarja Haaranen, director general for nature at Finland’s environment ministry. 

Bogs! What are they good for? 

In their pristine state, bogs are carpeted with delicate mosses that can’t fully decompose in their waterlogged habitats and slowly turn into soft, carbon-rich soil known as peat. 

This is what makes them Earth’s most effective repositories of CO2. Although they cover only 3 percent of the planet, they lock away a third of the world's carbon — twice the amount stored in forests....

....MUCH MORE 

In January 2023's "Ionosphere-Exciting HAARP Array Fired Up December 27":

Well, I guess the cat is out of the bag. 

"Sardonicus" has sussed out the action by way of old-fashioned empirical observation.

Using the cover story that they were exploring an asteroid, HAARP became active and the airspace around the Gulkana/Gokana Alaska site was closed to all air traffic.

This is the latest in a series of "experiments" that began in October.

The actual target of the ionospheric tweaking/twerking appears to be the Pripyat/Pripet/Pinsk marshes in southern Belarus/northern Ukraine. At 98,400 km square, 38,000 square miles, it is one of the largest wetlands in Europe and when unfrozen is an almost impassable barrier, making an armored/infantry attack on a direct Pinsk-Kyiv or Mazyr-Kyiv line very difficult.

 

Although dismissed by those with things to hide as "conspiracy theory" HAARPs capbility is what it is.

And temperatures in Pinsk have been running above normal, in fact above freezing. and look to be doing so for at least another week. 

If interested see also:  

Here's the Notice to Airmen, December 19:....

And again in July of that year - "Will Poland Widen The War To Belarus?" 

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