Ukrainian researcher Darya Tsymbalyuk has done a great service with this new book, Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War, collating and summarising a wide range of research and historical data into a compact account of how Russia’s invasion is damaging both Ukraine’s ecology and that of the world.
The book is in six thematic chapters, covering water, earth/soil, air, plants, “bodies” (both animal and human), and energy. Tsymbalyuk combines data and factual reporting with personal reflections and accounts of Ukraine’s natural world and the experiences of the Ukrainian people. The result is readable and touching, while still conveying important information about the scale and significance of ecological damage.
The title should leave no ambiguity about the author’s argument, but the word “ecocide” is no accident either: the Ukrainian government is one of only around a dozen states to have explicit laws against ecocide, defined as “the mass destruction of flora and fauna, poisoning of air or water resources, and also any other actions that may cause an environmental disaster”. The Ukrainian government is recording information on ecological damage caused by Russia, and has begun at least one court case on a charge of ecocide.
That case regards the one act of environmental damage that most will have heard of, the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and subsequent flooding. Occupied at the start of the invasion, the dam burst after what appeared to be controlled explosions from the inside on 6 June 2023. 18.2 square kilometres of water were released, damaging over 5,000 square kilometres of land, flooding or outright destroying 60,000 buildings and numerous towns.
Much of the damage of the area has been exacerbated by Russian control: residents of flooded regions were offered next to no help from the occupiers, leading to far more deaths than necessary – though with no independent researchers allowed in, we may never know exactly how many.
The effect of flooding on surrounding ecosystems is almost impossible to properly gauge without researchers being given access, which Russia systematically denies. To name just one example, reservoir water pouring into the Black Sea led to salt levels in that sea being three times lower than normal, putting a huge number of species of flora and fauna in danger.
The chapter on “air” contains a number of quite distinct stories. Much of the Ukrainian steppe and the country’s warmer regions are significant in bird migration patterns across Europe and Asia, with countless species and millions of birds using Ukraine as a stop on their annual journey south through the Eurasian steppe. Bombing, destruction of habitats and the disruption of local ecosystems have had a terrible impact on these migration patterns, which will send ripples throughout global bird populations.
“Air” is also the air that humans breathe: Tsymbalyuk quotes Ukrainians in flooded villages recounting only being able to smell rot and mould for months on end after the Kakhovka disaster; bomb shelters, full of cold, damp air and hundreds of bodies, have become a standard feature of day-to-day Ukrainian life. The most striking quote is from Ukrainians in Chernihiv Oblast who were held as hostages in a school basement for almost a month: “the basement wasn’t heated, but the air was hot from the hundreds of bodies. The walls remained cold and condensation from people breathing ran down them, so that the people by the walls sat in puddles. But the real horror was the lack of oxygen […] as soon as you entered the room, you realised you should not go in, there is no air to breathe.”
Landmines will come to completely reshape the experience of Ukrainians for generations to come. More than six million Ukrainians currently live in close proximity to dangerous unexploded mines. At current estimates, it would take 500 sapper teams over 750 years to de-mine Ukraine, which is now one of the most heavily mined pieces of territory in human history – over 170,000 square kilometres. Ukrainian researchers are looking into comparable historical examples, such as southern Lebanon, where farmers switched from breeding cows to goats, which are lighter and less likely to set off embedded landmines.
The connections between extractive industries and warfare go beyond the use of oil and coal to power the war machine. The bombs that were dropped on the Mariupol Drama Theatre in March 2022 used components supplied by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who controls much of the region’s production and distribution of bauxite and alumina. Bauxite residue is extremely harmful, and until the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Deripaska earned large profits from an alumina refinery in Mykolaiv, which produces large quantities of bauxite residue, which is deeply dangerous for humans to breathe in. Another similar refinery in Halytsynove was measured to have tripled the local cancer rates.
Ecological disaster and grand-scale environmental overhaul are threaded throughout Ukraine’s history. The regions that are now flooded by the broken Kakhovka dam were once overturned, and many settlements destroyed entirely, by the construction of that dam, which was completed in 1956. That was one of Stalin’s grandiose, and often disastrous, “Transformation of Nature” projects, to which thousands of lives were lost and untold levels of ecological damage were wrought on the region.
The Chornobyl disaster is remembered as an episode in the collapse of the Soviet Union, but its radiation lives on in Ukrainian cultural memory (and health indicators), and its implosion is a very real and live example that the residents of Zaporizhzhia – home to one of the largest power plants in Europe – now refer to daily, as Russian bombs come within metres of the plant’s buildings. §