He had imagined 12 different scenarios, 12 emergency situations to be solved along the Russian Arctic, from Murmansk to Chukotka, alongside the Northern Sea Route. Kicking off these civil defense exercises commissioned by Vladimir Putin, on Tuesday 7 September, the Minister for Emergencies Evghenij Zinichev had defined them as “unique: in terms of format, geographical location and units involved”.
Apocalyptic scenarios are those imagined by the ministry, the Russian Civil Protection, which had assigned 6,000 specialists the task of dealing with a broken ice pick loaded with dangerous chemicals; an oil leak (a drama that occurred in May 2020 in these lands); the fire of a tanker, the fire broke out inside a floating nuclear power plant, an accident on a cruise ship in the Kola Bay.
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General Zinichev had personally presided over some of these training missions: but it was a much more trivial reason, a slippery rock, that killed him. Under the eyes of dozens of people.
“He died in the exercise of his duty, to save a life,” headline the Russian media. On Wednesday, the minister was continuing his inspections in the Norilsk region, in the heart of the Russian Arctic. He had visited the construction site of a new fire station, explains his ministry, and was following the filming of a documentary at the 27-meter-high Kitabo-Oron waterfall when a cameraman, director Aleksandr Mel’nik, slipped. and fell into the water. Zinichev, in the account of the witnesses, tried to grab him but fell with him, hitting a protruding rock with his head. Neither was saved.
Born in Leningrad in 1966, Zinichev had worked in the KGB in the 1980s, reaching the position of number two in the security services renamed the FSB. But between 2006 and 2015 he had worked as an “aide-de-camp” to the president, responsible for security. Mel’nik, 63, had directed the film “Territory. The gold of the ice “. And he was working on a documentary on the development of the Arctic and the Northern Sea Route, increasingly strategic regions for the Kremlin. As demonstrated by the desire to carry out these exercises which, comments the Ria Novosti agency, “should have made history for other reasons”.