The town that reveals how Russia spills two Deepwater Horizons of oil each year
Source: Guardian UK
The Komi Republic in northern Russia is renowned for its many lakes, but sites contaminated by oil are almost just as easy to find in the Usinsk oilfields. From pumps dripping oil and huge ponds of black sludge to dying trees and undergrowth — a likely sign of an underground pipeline leak — these spills are relatively small and rarely garner media attention.
But they add up quickly, threatening fish stocks, pasture land and drinking water. According to the natural resources and environment minister, Sergei Donskoi, 1.5m tonnes of oil are spilled in Russia each year. That’s more than twice the amount released by the record-breaking Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
The main problem, according to the natural resources ministry, is that 60% of pipeline infrastructure is deteriorated. And with fines inexpensive and oversight lax, oil companies find it more profitable to patch up holes and pour sand on spills — or do nothing at all — than invest in quality infrastructure and comprehensive cleanups, according to activists.
“The pipelines are very worn out, they’re left over from the USSR,” said Greenpeace research projects coordinator, Vasily Yablokov. “The oil companies have realised they’re losing a lot of oil and are starting to replace them, but it’s laughable. They need to do much more.”
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/05/the-town-that-reveals-how-russia-spills-two-deepwater-horizons-of-oil-each-year
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So many of the ongoing Russian ecological disasters elicit a giant 
Oil contamination, sinkholes, Aral Sea degradation, Lake Baikal pollution and degradation ... The only time that Putin says anything about them is when he can use them as a nationalistic cudgel to make others look bad and rally the state serfs around him or to accomplish some domestic political goal like ousting a mayor or making an opposition politician unelectable. Otherwise, pointing out how some oligarch or state company is screwing things up is inakomyslie or "deviant or divergent thinking" and subject to some sort of public sanction, formal or informal.
I think we should borrow that word, inakomyslie, because a lot of Americans like the idea. Too bad the author of the Divergent trilogy didn't use it and popularize it.
People looking at soil remediation were talking about how many millions of barrels of oil could be reclaimed fairly cheaply from the surface (in Western terms), and that was a couple of decades ago. Western oil companies were looking at this, but the oligarchs and emergent Russian nationalism squashed that--and then squashed the idea of remediation. If anybody benefits, it has to be you--and if it means everybody loses, that's better than just them winning (or winning more than you).
You'd need large machines that would scoop up soil to a depth of a meter or more and extract the oil. Sadly, with that volume of contaminated soil, the only thing you can do is extract every bit you can and put it back. Nobody wants dozens of km^3 of landfill that's toxic waste. Of course, cheap remediation wouldn't do as thorough a job of oil extraction as expensive remediation, and nobody in Russia really cared or cares (except to the extent it enriches the state or an oligarch or the funny system of state-approved oligarchs that they have now).
Making the situation worse (and better) is the permafrost in some areas. On the one hand, it keeps the oil from penetrating too deeply--even if it thaws, it's still saturated and the oil won't continue to soak in (also some compounds may find their way into solution). On the other, permafrost regions tend to be very swampy in the summer, making access difficult; in Soviet times some remote villages were cut off to all but air drops duing the summer because the roads melted. The climate also means the ecosystem depends on a limited growth season and is delicate, while at the same time a limited growth season allows much less time for the petroleum to be biologically degraded. Moreover, once the soil freezes so access is easier you can't remediate anything.