President: Illegal amber mining grows into nationwide environmental disaster

"This problem has grown into the environmental disaster of a nationwide scale. Indeed, thousands of hectares of forest land have turned into a desert. We understand that people hunt for amber, we understand that this is a real war - I can’t put this another way - a war between the state and the criminal world covered up by the police, the Security Service of Ukraine and the prosecutor’s office,” President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said at a meeting dedicated to the illegal amber mining in Zhytomyr region, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

The President added that the war gained momentum in 2014, and "nobody has controlled it, except for gangs and even civil servants involved in this activity."

ol