Azovo-Syvaskyi

The park is mostly water, and strange water at that. Of its 52,154 hectares only about 8,500 are dry land; the rest is the Utliuk liman, a slice of the Sea of Azov, and above all the Syvash — the "Rotten Sea," a labyrinth of hypersaline lagoons trapped between the Kherson mainland and Crimea. In high summer the brine goes pink with salt-loving algae, the mudflats reek of sulphide, and the whole system seethes with brine shrimp and midge larvae — which is precisely why more than a million birds stage here on the Azov–Black Sea flyway. The Syvash was listed under the Ramsar convention as early as 1976, and the vast Central Syvash followed in 1995.

The dry heart is Biriuchyi, a 7,232-hectare island-spit at the seaward end of the Fedotova kosa: steppe grass, thickets of oleaster, and herds that belong to no ordinary national park. Protection here goes back to 1927, when the seaside spits were reserved under Askania-Nova's wing; a full zapovidnyk followed in 1937. But in 1957 the reserve was demoted to a "reserve-hunting economy" — a shooting estate for the Soviet elite — and the acclimatisation programme begun in 1928 was run to stock it: red deer (some 830 by 1992), fallow deer (over 1,400), mouflon (nearly a thousand), pheasants, and kulans, Asiatic wild asses out of Askania-Nova stock. The 1993 upgrade to national park changed the letterhead more than the culture: after 2000 the park was administered by the State Directorate of Affairs, which made Biriuchyi a presidential hunting ground in all but name.

It was still, for all that, one of the great wildlife spectacles of the Ukrainian south — white-tailed eagles over the lagoons, white-headed ducks and clouds of waders on the Syvash flats, deer in their hundreds against a bare steppe horizon. Since the first days of the 2022 invasion all of it has been occupied. Henichesk, where the park is headquartered, was made the seat of the occupation administration for Kherson oblast; the staff who left work in exile, and news of the herds arrives second-hand, some of it in the form of reports about hunts laid on for the occupiers.

What's worth knowing before you go

There is no going. The park, Henichesk and the whole Syvash shore have been under Russian occupation since February–March 2022, and nothing here can be visited or independently checked. Even before the war this was never open country: Biriuchyi was a restricted zone seen only on arranged park excursions out of Henichesk, and the Syvash's interior was more mud than path. If the park returns to Ukrainian hands, its oldest question returns with it — whether Biriuchyi finally stops being a game farm and becomes the strict reserve its 1927 founders had in mind.