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Cars in a traffic jam in the middle of the fog in Kiev, October 25, 2019. REUTERS / Gleb Garanich

In a few days, Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, has become the European city where you breathe the least. The fault of a knife-cut fog that has stagnated on the Ukraine for several days. A controversy has erupted around what looks much more like an air pollution.

With our correspondent in Kiev, Stéphane Siohan

In the evening, in Kiev, a real white cloak takes over the city, sinks into the streets, gives buildings and trees phantasmagorical gaits: that's for the poetic aspect, because by day, it's good simple, we breathe very badly.

This stationary fog is in season, the earth is still hot, but the temperatures are falling and we are approaching the winter. Only here, the liquid particles are almost visible to the naked eye and then there is the smell of earth, peat that enters the mouth.

So in Kiev, we worry pretty quickly clouds like this, when we know that the Chernobyl area is only an hour and a half away.

The phenomenon could be explained by two reasons: fires in peat bogs in the south of Kiev, and the habit that Kievians have of burning vegetable waste, dead leaves, even inside the city.

However, some environmental NGOs point out that car traffic and fumes from factories inherited from the Soviet period are the main reason for the coughing that has taken hold of many people.

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