Vangheluwe said Avramenko's video apparently shows another research station, "which was effectively bombed, and planting for seed sale was interrupted." While some of the working samples destroyed may have been lost forever, the main collection, which is housed in underground vaults, appears to be safe, for now, according to other sources, such as Nick Vangheluwe from Euroseed-a trade association for the European seed industry-and Lise Lykke Steffensen, head of NordGen, which runs the The Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
In the video itself, Avramenko said "everything" had been turned into ashes by Russian military attacks. Tens of thousands of plant varieties from around the world have ceased to exist." In the description of the video, Avramenko said: "By purposeful bombing, the Russian army destroyed the world's plant gene pool in Ukraine. The facility, which is part of the Plant Production institute's National Center for Plant Genetic Resources of Ukraine (PGRU), had collected more than 150,000 specimens belonging to hundreds of plant and crop species as of 2021.īut on May 14, a PGRU scientist, Sergey Avramenko, posted a video on his YouTube channel, in which he claimed that the Russian army had destroyed the gene bank, while showing footage of himself in a severely damaged building. Reports have emerged online that Ukraine's national plant gene bank-one of the largest in the world in terms of its volume and diversity, located in Kharkiv-was destroyed by Russian shelling. A Ukrainian Army soldier walks past a burning natural gas terminal on on the northern outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine.