History of Franz Josef Land for a national park covering northern Novaya Zemlya and Franz Josef Land were launched in the 2000s. When the Russian Arctic National Park was established on 15June 2009, Franz Josef Land and Victoria Island were excluded. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited the archipelago in 2010, describing it as a "giant rubbish tip". By 2011 the national park had been expanded to include Franz Josef Land in a move to better accommodate tourism in the archipelago. From 2012, Russia commenced a 1.5 billion ruble, three-year clean-up project to remove more than 100,000 tonnes of waste which had accumulated during the Soviet
Novaya Zemlya due south. Anticipating the breakout, the German Task Force commander Rear Admiral Hubert Schmundt (Fig. 40) pre-positioned several U-boats near the strait’s western entrance. Six of the seventeen Allied ships exiting the strait were subsequently sunk. The badly-damaged American freighter "Alcoa Ranger" was beached on Novaya Zemlya’s west coast. Its crew found temporary shelter and were eventually rescued by a Russian vessel which took them to Belushya Bay. The Germans also damaged the Soviet tankers "Donbass" and "Azerbaijan," both of which reached the sanctuary of Archangel. Of the thirty-four merchant ships in PQ-17, twenty-four were destroyed. The American contingent alone