For decades, Russia’s oil giants have been polluting parts of the country’s once thriving landscape, often in secret, spilling oil onto the land and into the Arctic Ocean, poisoning the water and destroying the livelihood of local communities and Indigenous Peoples.

In the long Arctic winter, oil leaks unnoticed from numerous underground pipeline ruptures. With the rising temperatures in summer, huge amounts of oil are flushed with the melt-water into the rivers. “In springtime it is the worst,” say the inhabitants of Ust’-Usa. “Then you have got oil in the water, in the air, in the food, everywhere. It stinks of oil. The spring is one of the worst seasons.”

Tens of thousands of small-scale leaks from pipelines throughout the Russian oil fields result in millions of tonnes of oil polluting the landscape every year.

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