Ecocide in Ukraine

If you had traveled to Ukraine before Russia's full-scale invasion, you might have camped in the tranquil forests of Hetman National Park, a 90-square-mile wilderness along the Vorskla River in the northeastern part of the country. Tall pines and oak canopies filtered the light; birds and insects moved through the river bends and wetlands. By the end of February 2022, the whole area was under military occupation. Today, walking through those woods is forbidden. Artillery fire and landmines make the area too dangerous. The forest now stands empty and charred.

Hetman National Park was an early front in a war that has brought mass death and suffering to Ukraine. Tens of thousands have been killed, far more wounded, millions displaced, and entire cities and families shattered. Against that overwhelming human toll, the park marks a second kind of loss, harder to undo. Experts have a word for lasting environmental damage on this scale: ecocide, the widespread destruction of ecosystems that can poison water, ruin soil, erase habitats, and hinder recovery for years or decades. 

Ukraine’s Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources estimates around 180 billion EUR in environmental damage between 2022 and 2025. Rivers and seas have been contaminated by toxins and heavy metals from guns, missiles, drones, and combat vehicles. Forests have burned in crossfire. Soils have absorbed dangerous chemicals. Endemic species have lost their habitats. And large areas of the country have become unusable because of landmines and unexploded ordnance, preventing farming, forestry, fishing, and safe return to everyday life.

These problems are not unique to Ukraine. Around the world — in the Balkans, in France, in parts of Africa and Asia — wars have left behind damaged landscapes that take generations to recover. That recovery must extend to land, water and species. Reckoning with the ecological costs of war requires measuring what has been harmed, containing what can spread, and restoring what can be restored. If it succeeds, Ukraine’s response could offer other societies a model for confronting the same damage after their own wars.

More than four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainians are already trying to imagine the ecological work of peace. Scientists know the environmental damage is vast, but they do not yet know how vast. Nor is it clear how much of the environment needs active rehabilitation, versus how much of it can naturally recover on its own. Ukraine’s recovery planners will likely have to rely on a form of ecological triage — focusing on active restoration where it can do the most good, enforcing exclusion zones where it cannot, and acknowledging that some damage may simply be irreversible.

Scientists are building computer models to plan for post-war recovery. “Forecasting is one of the tasks of machine learning,” says Nataliia Kussul, an expert in remote sensing at the Space Research Institute of Ukraine's National Academy of Sciences. “Using archival data and satellite imagery, we build models to predict how damaged land may recover in the future.” Archival data, unlike satellite imagery, is not always available. And the scale of destruction, the scarcity of data, and the added variable of climate change mean that recovery can produce unexpected results.

Such uncertainties sometimes lead to good news. “After the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, there were many forecasts, but I don’t think anyone expected the submerged floodplains of the historic Velykyi Luh to rebound so quickly,” says Oleksii Vasyliuk, an ecologist and co-founder of the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group. “We did not expect to see trees grow 3.5 meters within a single year. This abnormally fast growth was caused by the extreme changes in the environment.” Rapid regrowth is not the same as restored biodiversity; fast-colonizing species often crowd out the rarer plants and animals that took centuries to establish. But scientists say it offers evidence that some war-damaged land can still recover vigorously, given time and protection from further disturbance.

Kussul and her students are now working to sketch possible futures for Ukraine’s damaged landscapes using an AI-based model that Kussul originally developed to study farmland. By analyzing satellite images, the team had trained a deep-learning system to estimate crop yields—wheat, corn, sunflower, soy, sugar beet—with 95 percent accuracy. Today, the World Bank relies on this model to track agricultural losses and forecast recovery: which fields were hit, where crops have declined, and how much land is now planted with corn or wheat. By feeding data into the AI models, Kussul hopes to map out recovery scenarios for Ukraine’s war-damaged wilderness and help define priorities for ecological restoration. The approach is being adapted to detect which species are recolonizing burned land, where erosion is accelerating, and which zones have gone ecologically silent.

Ukraine’s environmental recovery will demand more than smart management. It will require the painstaking and dangerous work of removing landmines. Ukraine is now the most mined country in the world, with landmines placed on at least 30 percent of its territory—about 175,000 square kilometers. Scientists estimate that it could take up to 750 years to clear some areas using current techniques. And clearing mines creates its own environmental challenges.

Ukraine has already begun removing mines from de-occupied territories using robotic systems, mine trawls, and drones that detect and detonate mines. “But this method can be catastrophically harmful to the environment,” warns Vasyliuk. “Each explosion adds chemical contamination to the soil, and mines under tree roots are nearly impossible to reach. In some cases, we may have to follow the example of France after World War I — to seal off and ‘conserve’ contaminated areas for decades, giving nature a chance to restore itself.”

Demining the Black Sea along Ukraine’s southern coast is no less problematic. “If we simply use mine trawls, the explosions will destroy marine ecosystems and cause massive chemical and noise pollution. If we keep them, they will continue poisoning the sea,” says Viktor Komorin, deputy director of the Ukrainian Scientific Center of Ecology of the Sea. Scientists are starting to explore unconventional options. “Research is underway on algae capable of absorbing toxic substances,” Komorin notes. But such bioremediation techniques are suitable only for enclosed bodies of water like lakes or small reservoirs, not for an entire sea. 

Once the war ends, the only realistic option may be a cautious, imperfect one: mapping the most contaminated zones, comparing them with shipping routes, and starting to clear mines where the risk to people and ecosystems is lowest.

Restoring Ukraine’s environment will be one of the most daunting tasks the country faces after the war. First, there is the huge financial cost: untold billions of dollars for cleanup, demining, and rebuilding. Then there is the environmental cost. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a chaotic and unsystematic recovery could spark new damage, from mass mine detonations to the overuse of fragile natural resources. 

But recovery is the only option: rebuilding cannot happen on poisoned ground. Contaminated water, toxic soil, and mine-strewn farmland threaten the economic and social recovery that Ukrainians are counting on. Restoration and reconstruction are the same project.

Ukraine has lived through catastrophic environmental damage before. The Chornobyl disaster of 1986 contaminated huge stretches of northern Ukraine and neighboring countries. Scientists are still measuring its effects. Russia's war adds a new, compounding layer to a landscape that has never fully healed. 

Few people abroad may be familiar with the forests of Hetman National Park, but pollution from the fires there has spread far beyond the park's borders. Likewise, few may know about the Kakhovka dam or the submerged territories after its destruction, but its collapse sent mines and toxic floodwaters into the Black Sea.

The longer the war lasts, the deeper its ecological imprint becomes. Forest fires release carbon stored over decades. Wetland destruction can unleash methane. Large-scale soil disruption can alter regional hydrology. Russia’s war in Ukraine is a military and humanitarian catastrophe. It is also reshaping forests, rivers, farmland and seas in ways that will outlast the fighting.

Peace will not restore those places on its own. It will only make restoration possible.