Pryazovskyi
Lagoon country on the Sea of Azov — the Molochnyi and Utliuk limans, the roots of the Fedotova and Berdiansk spits, and the mud-cure resorts of Kyrylivka, under Russian occupation since 2022.
Pryazovskyi is one of the largest national parks in Ukraine: 78,127 hectares strung in a broken chain along well over a hundred kilometres of the Sea of Azov's northwestern shore, from the Utliuk liman to the approaches of the Berdiansk spit. It is a park of limans — drowned steppe-river mouths that the sea's shell-sand bars have pinched into brackish lagoons, each in its own state of divorce from open water. Declared in 2010, it stitched several decades' worth of older reserves into a single coastal system.
The centrepiece is the Molochnyi liman, twenty-two thousand hectares fed by the Molochna river and joined to the sea only by an artificial channel that silts shut every few years, sending the lagoon's salinity swinging and its ecology with it. Its sulphide muds built the resort economy of Kyrylivka, the sprawling village at the root of the Fedotova spit between the Molochnyi and Utliuk limans, where sanatoria dispensed mud baths to generations of Soviet and Ukrainian holidaymakers. Westward lie the Utliuk liman and the Stepanivska spit; eastward the coast runs toward Berdiansk and its long, curling kosa.
The birds are the reason the park is this big. The Azov lagoons are a bottleneck on the Azov–Black Sea flyway, with hundreds of thousands of waders, terns and wildfowl staging on the flats; the Molochnyi liman is a Ramsar site; and a significant share of the world's red-breasted geese — a globally threatened species — has wintered on these shores and the steppe fields behind them.
All of it was occupied within the first weeks of the 2022 invasion. Melitopol, where the park's directorate sat, fell in the war's opening days; Berdiansk followed on 27 February; Kyrylivka's holiday coast became garrison country, with fortification lines reported dug through dunes and spits. The park's Ukrainian administration works displaced, keeping the institution alive on paper while independent verification of the lagoons' condition is impossible.
What's worth knowing before you go
The entire park has been under Russian occupation since spring 2022 and cannot be visited. The pre-war routine — trains to Melitopol, minibuses down to Kyrylivka, high-summer crowds on the Fedotova spit, birders working the Molochnyi liman's shores in spring and autumn — belongs, for now, to the past tense. What reports leak out describe resorts run under new flags and military engineering where the beach umbrellas stood; what can be said with confidence is only what the geography says, which is that the limans have outlasted every empire on this coast so far.