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February marked the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 12 months of humanitarian, political and economic crises. Tens of thousands of lives have been lost, millions of people have been displaced, and while the Ukrainian military surprised the world by standing its ground and reclaiming half of the land conquered by Russia this year, there is no clear end to the fighting.
The conflict also put the global oil trade in the spotlight. From the start, some argued that rising gas prices in the absence of Russian fuel supplies would boost clean energy planning in Europe and elsewhere. But a year later it has become clear that the war has essentially led to a doubling of dirty fuel consumption, at least in the short term.
European fossil fuel subsidies rose higher than ever, and carbon emissions reached a global peak as countries rushed to coal, oil and gas. Countries that couldn’t afford natural gas began to burn more coal, and US President Joe Biden called for more domestic production of fossil fuels. Meanwhile, Shell, Exxon and BP reported record profits.
Largely ignored, however, at least in many international circles, is the massive environmental impact of the war on Ukraine itself. A year later, the extent of this damage becomes clear. In its campaign, Russia has targeted power grids, oil refineries and nuclear power plants, causing untold damage to ecosystems, soil and water by bombing fields and industrial sites.
“In 2015, we had an oil plant fire that was one of the biggest environmental disasters in Ukrainian history,” said Yevheniia Zasiadko, the head of the climate department of Ecoaction, a Ukrainian non-profit organization. “Since the Russians invaded, more than 40 such facilities have been destroyed throughout Ukraine.”
Attacks on oil depots sparked some of the tens of thousands of fires that have broken out across Ukraine, usually starting with shelling. About a third of the country’s forests have been degraded and more than 27,000 hectares have burned completely, according to data from the Ukrainian Ministry of the Environment (as reported in The Economist, the ministry’s website was down at the time of publication).
Oil and burned trees are some of the main causes of the 46.2 million tons of carbon dioxide or CO2 released into the atmosphere since the Russian invasion. The ministry says air pollution has been one of the most costly environmental effects of the war.
Ecoaction has been tracking environmental damage since last February, extracting information from media reports and local government announcements and publishing updated findings online every two weeks. Greenpeace joined the effort to provide satellite verification and mapping.
So far, the team has documented 863 cases of degradation, including widespread wildfires, destroyed terrestrial and marine ecosystems, burst pipelines filling wetlands with oil, sunken ships in the Black Sea, waste from chemical plants spilling into rivers, and radioactive discharges from nuclear power plants . .
“A huge area is still occupied, so we don’t even know what’s happening there,” said Zasiadko. Much of the liberated area of Ukraine is full of explosive mines, posing a challenge for mapping and ground observation.
“Ukraine is an industrialized country and we have a lot of chemistry and heavy metal [processing] factories,” said Zasiadko. Much of it was destroyed, she said, releasing toxins that spilled into waterways and leached into the soil. In the early days of the war, part of a Russian missile hit a livestock waste depot near the Ikva River in the Rivne region of western Ukraine and caused a fish kill in the neighboring region.
In another case near Sumy, in northeastern Ukraine, people had to stay indoors for days after receiving reports of ammonia leaks from an affected power plant.
“Because a lot of area was being cleared [with explosive devices]firefighters can’t do their job and local scientists can’t monitor the situation.”
See also: I led my Ukrainian team throughout the war. Here are 6 leadership rules to follow in a crisis.
The growing problem of ‘war waste’
Kateryna Polyanska, an ecologist with the Ukrainian environmental organization Environment People Law, travels the country to survey the landscape and take soil samples from mine craters. “In the beginning I tried to analyze satellite imagery, but it wasn’t enough,” she told Grist. “I understood that I had to go to the fields.” Her early lab results have found nickel, zinc and other heavy metals from shells, bombs and shrapnel in the ground, as well as chemical contamination and fuel from unexploded rockets. During her travels, she also observed the growing problem of “war waste,” toxic materials from debris, such as asbestos in home ceilings, with no place for proper disposal.
“Many of these things have a huge risk to human health and lives,” said Polyanska, adding that the attacks and their aftereffects have also affected animals, such as foxes in the forest, dolphins in the Black Sea and rare ecosystems such as the Sacred Sea. Mountains in Donetsk province, eastern Ukraine.
More than 30 percent of the country’s protected natural areas have been affected and the Ministry of the Environment estimates that 600 animal species and 880 plant species are threatened with extinction, as reported in the Guardian.
Radioactive radiation
Another point of particular concern is nuclear radiation. Last February and March, Russian troops occupied the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the site of a notorious nuclear accident in 1986, for five weeks; they dug trenches in the thousand-square-mile radioactive exclusion zone, now effectively a protected area. Studies, after they left, showed radiation levels three times higher than normal in parts of the Red Forest.
“Because a lot of area was being cleared [meaning scattered with explosive devices]”Firefighters can’t do their job and local scientists can’t monitor the situation,” said Denys Tsutsaiev, a Greenpeace campaigner in Kiev. .
Ukraine’s four active nuclear power plants, where the country gets half of its electricity, are also at risk. For the past 11 months, Russian troops have occupied the Zaporizhzhia plant in the south of the country, and damage to surrounding power lines has raised concerns about reactors overheating. “At the moment there is only one backup line connected to the exchange,” said Tsutsaiev. Russians have also drained the nearby Kakhovka reservoir, which is used to cool the plant’s reactors and supply water to large populations in the south.
Donbas, the eastern region of the country where much of the industry is concentrated, is also the country’s main coal-producing area. It has long been a conflict zone, partially declared an independent territory by pro-Russian separatists in 2014 and currently under Russian occupation. Between 2015 and 2021, international monitoring found that more than 30 coal mines in the region had flooded, polluting ground and surface water with metals, sulfates and mineral salts. Since the full-scale invasion began, 10 more have been flooded, but the true number may be higher.
“When Russia occupies an area, they usually cut off the electricity,” Zasiadko said. “That means the pipelines aren’t draining groundwater and the mines are flooding.”
The consequences of no electricity
While much of Ukraine’s power grid miraculously survives, more than 213 reported attacks on power supplies in recent months have left large parts of the country without power, limiting drinking water treatment and endangering human health.
With the war still raging, Zasiadko says it has been difficult to get Ukrainian officials and international allies to pay attention to reconstruction in liberated areas. Even more difficult is drawing resources for environmental restoration.
“Ukrainian authorities are talking about ecocide, but there is not much action on ‘what are we going to do with the pollutants?'” Zasiadko said. “There is mainly discussion about the reconstruction of infrastructure and roads.” In July, at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Lugano, Switzerland, the Ukrainian authorities presented their first reconstruction plan to a large group of international leaders and financial institutions; environmental groups objected to it on the grounds that it consisted mainly of construction projects “without a systematic approach to conservation”.
Zasiadko says the priority when it comes to the environment should be testing, monitoring and cleaning up pollution. Ukraine’s economy is 40 percent agriculture, she said, and it’s already reflected in the reclaimed areas. “At the moment, the ground is not always cleared and there are many examples of explosions on agricultural land.” She is concerned that people grow food in contaminated soil. Soil remediation is a lengthy undertaking, specific to the location and contamination. And demining can take 10 years. “In the future, we will need special divers who can go in and clean the rivers of explosives and mines,” Polyanska said.
The Ukrainian Ministry of the Environment, in turn, maintains an extensive register of the environmental damage and evaluates the costs with the aim of seeking compensation from Russia. The ministry’s most recent findings report that nearly a third of the country remains at risk, 160 natural areas are under threat of destruction, and the total cost of environmental damage exceeds $50 billion. While Tsutsaiev appreciates efforts to document the damage, he says the government and partners must also seek other funding and plan how recovery will take place.
When war broke out, Ukraine was in the middle of a pilot “just transition” program to help coal workers find new clean energy jobs in nine cities in the eastern mining regions. That project has been put on hold. Tsutsayev hopes the reconstruction can be used as an opportunity to rebuild in the face of climate change. “Greening reconstruction means empowering local municipalities not to use all the old technologies, but to think about energy independence and energy security,” said Tsutsaev. He cited the example of a hospital near Kiev that was damaged in the first days of the war. Greenpeace helped with the reconstruction with the installation of a heat pump and solar panels.
“Now, if there is no electricity in the area, the hospital continues to receive power,” he said.
