Waterway E40

Waterway E40 is a planned navigable transport route that aims to connect the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea.
The length is approximately 2000 km. According to the project, the route runs from the city of Gdansk in Poland through the territory of the Republic of Belarus and to the city of Kherson in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian part of the E40 waterway will follow the riverbed of the Pripyat River through the Chernobyl exclusion zone and the river Dnieper to the city of Kherson and exit to the Black Sea. The total area of the regions through which the E40 is to pass is about, with a population of 28,690,834.
Officially, the planning of the E40 waterway is still at an early stage, but in Ukraine, strategic documents are already being prepared and individual project parts are being implemented. In particular, in 2020, the Pripyat River was dredged within the exclusion zone.
The implementation of the E40 project has attracted considerable criticism from international and local public organizations in all three countries, as well as experts in the biological and environmental fields. The international campaign "STOP E40" against the implementation of the waterway project has been created".
According to experts of scientific institutions of the Republic of Belarus, the construction of the waterway will have a significant negative impact on the natural and cultural heritage of Polesia, on the well-being of the population of Polesia, as well as on the global carbon balance, hydrological and radiation situations, economy, transport development. There are alternative scenarios for the construction of the E40 for the development of Polesia and transport links between Ukraine, Poland and Belarus. First of all, it is about the reorientation of the Polesia region to the ecotourism industry. This was confirmed by a study conducted by Aivar Ruukel, a member of the board of the Global Ecotourism Network and a tour operator in the Soomaa National Park, Estonia.
The press has repeatedly stated that the E40 waterway is a restoration of an ancient transport route "from Varangians to the Greeks".

The story of the project

In 1996 in Geneva European Agreement on Main Inland Waterways of International Importance. Geneva, 19 January 1996 was signed. This list also includes E40 .
The map of the E40 path first appeared in a document United Nations Economic Commission for Europe "White Paper on the progress, accomplishment and future of sustainable inland water transport" and was published separately on the resources of the UNECE.
In the early 2010s, a Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian business consortium was created, which from Ukraine included not the central state bodies responsible for transport or the environment, but the Volyn Regional Water Resources Management and the NGO "Volyn Association of Scientists and Innovators". Although the project route will not pass through the territory Volyn region, it depends on the water resources of this area and will affect the local hydrological situation. Also, the invitation of participants from this area is explained by the intention to receive financial support under the Program of Cross-border Cooperation Poland-Belarus-Ukraine, funded by the European Union.
On December 1, 2013, the project "Restoration of the main waterway E-40 on the Dnieper-Vistula section from strategy to planning" was launched with a budget of more than 0.9 million euros. The EU funds amounted to € 821,281, the participants ' own funds - €91376. This money was spent mainly on the preliminary assessment of the project and lobbying for the project. In 2015, a preliminary feasibility study of the project was published. According to this preliminary assessment, the route will pass through river systems of rivers Vistula, Zakhodni Bugа, Pina, Pripyat and Dnieper. As a result of the project, the riverbeds of these rivers will be changed: straightened / supported by dam/ deepened / widened or drained.
Although some sections of the ship's course already exist, the scale of the proposed new development is so global that, according to experts, an environmental disaster in the region is highly possible.
Today, international and European financial institutions have not agreed financing the E40, because they have quite strict requirements for the environmental friendliness of the projects they support.

Project implementation in Poland

Project implementation in Belarus

Project implementation in Ukraine

On October 4, 2019, as part of the participation in the Second Forum of the Regions of Ukraine and Belarus, the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky and the President of the Republic of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko concluded an agreement, according to which in 2020 the Ukrainian side was to conduct dredging on the Pripyat and Dnieper rivers, necessary to restore full-fledged ship traffic.
On February 6, 2020, the Minister of Infrastructure of Ukraine Vladyslav Krykliy stated that «the project to restore the E-40 river route has reached the stage of practical implementation».
In the summer and autumn of 2020, dredging was carried out on the Pripyat River at eight points. Environmental impact assessment of these works was not carried out.
On September 30, 2020, Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine adopted a resolution "On Amendments to the List of inland waterways classified as navigable". This regulation also includes E40.
On November 25, 2020, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine approved the draft Agreement between the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and the Government of the People’s Republic of China a on strengthening cooperation in the field of infrastructure construction and authorized the Minister of Infrastructure Vladyslav Krykliy to sign this Agreement. This opens the way for the project's lobbyists to obtain Chinese loans for the construction of the E40.
On December 11, 2020, the website State Agency of Ukraine for Exclusion Zone Management published the Announcement of the publication of the Strategy for the development of the exclusion zone in 2021-2030. The draft strategy contains section 5.9. Development of transport infrastructure, which is entirely devoted to lobbying for the construction of the E40 through the exclusion zone. After critical statements of public organizations, State Agency of Ukraine for Exclusion Zone Management promised to exclude this section from the strategy.

International public campaign «Save Polesia»

"Save Polesia" is part of the international coalition Save Polesia, which unites public organizations from Belarus, Ukraine, Poland and Germany. The goal of the campaign is to promote Polesia as a unique nature reserve with high environmental and cultural significance, including for obtaining the status of a World Heritage Site and the cancellation of the construction of the E40 waterway. By 2020, the public campaign against the construction of the E40 waterway, which can pass through the rivers of Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, was called "Stop E40". The coalition believes that the E40 project is poorly thought out and economically impractical, and the construction of the E40 itself will be a disaster both for the unique region of the Belarusian Polesia, and for a number of valuable natural territories of Poland and Ukraine. The campaign still uses the hashtag #stop_E40 in social networks.
The public campaign "Save Polesia" wants to draw the attention of the governments of Belarus, Poland, Ukraine and the European Parliament to the threat to the valuable natural territories of Polesia and to demonstrate that any decisions on the construction of the E40 waterway project should be made with the active participation of the public and independent experts. According to the coalition members, the E40 waterway project has dubious economic value and clearly poses a serious threat to nature. At the same time, the virgin territory of Polesia has great potential for promoting ecotourism, strengthening local business and sustainable development of the entire region.
In September 2020, leading European environmental organizations sent an open letter to the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In their address, they expressed serious concern about the start of construction of the Baltic-Black Sea megacanal.
Office of the President instructed the secretariat of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine to respond to the letter, which in turn instructed this Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine. In the letter-response of the department dated 29.12.2020 No. 25/8-12/12524-20 is specified: «In connection with the intentions of dredging on the Ukrainian section of the Pripyat River, the Ministry has repeatedly in its appeals to the Ministry of Infrastructure emphasized the high probability of deterioration of water quality during dredging due to the presence of radioactive sediments there. Especially on the section of the Pripyat River within the territory of the exclusion zone, the zone of unconditional resettlement and in the upper reaches of the Kyiv reservoir. The issue of dredging in Pripyat requires a thorough scientific study of the current state of bottom sediments, analysis of the impact of dredging on natural ecosystems that are of particular environmental importance, in particular those located within the objects of the nature reserve Fund of Ukraine or in some areas in the immediate vicinity of these territories.».At the same time Minister Krykliy in his letter on the same topic did not comment on the lack of conclusions Strategic Environmental Assessment and Environmental Impact Assessment of the work in Pripyat and the start of construction of the E40.

Economic indicators of the project according to the calculations of the developers

The cost of the construction of the canal is $ 12 billion. According to the project's lobbyists, the creation of the E-40 will allow to transport up to 4 million tons of cargo annually. This will revive trade between Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, whose total markets are almost 100 million people.
According to the feasibility study, river transport makes it possible to transport large volumes of cargo. Thus, a 900-ton platform barge replaces 18 wagons or 45 twenty-ton trucks. The E40 channel is planned to transport millions of tons of cargo that will sail from the project countries to the EU and further around the world. There is a hope to see ships with the flags of the Scandinavian countries on the route. In addition, the E-40 will provide significant time savings for carriers operating in the Central and Eastern European regions. Currently, the Rhine-Main-Danube connection is used for cargo delivery in this direction. However, the E-40 is shorter than this connection by almost 1,000 kilometers. This means shortening the journey by 2-4 days at an average speed of 10-20 km/h for river cargo vessels.
The asset also includes potential cross-border river cruises.