Ukrainian scholars track war-related ecocide in real time

The world, especially the world’s ocean, is interconnected. The Black Sea is not on Mars. If something [pollution] happens in the Black Sea, it would reach the United States in several months or several years. And if something is happening in the air above the Black Sea, this would reach the United States in several weeks. The consequences of what happens in the Black Sea are found globally. – Dr Pavel Gol’din on why scientists around the world should be interested in the widespread ecological damage the Russian invasion is causing in Ukraine.

In the days after the full-scale Russian attack on Ukraine on 24 February 2022, as dark grey smoke from collapsed buildings and inky black smoke from burning oil depots stained the sky above the country’s capital, Ukraine’s ecological scientists were already in the process of totalling up what they knew was an ecological crisis in the making.

What lay people saw as waves of dust or stygian smoke were for these men and women akin to the equations that are the warp and woof of their specialities – and ones that made clear the dangerous elements and compounds either being breathed in or settling on the country’s rich agricultural land, wetlands and littoral waters – and poisoning them.

“As soon as we could, we sampled leaves, because aerosols from the explosions settle on them,” geophysicist Kseniia Bondar told University World News. “We also sampled tree bark. There are air sampling stations that pump air through filters, so we collected these filters too.

“We were trying to find the correlations between what we found and the magnetic parameters of different heavy metals, such as copper, lead, zinc, nickel, cobalt, chromium and cadmium, which are toxic.

“Our aim was to calculate the different indexes of pollution to create a node index which would allow us to categorise territory according to the level of pollution in relation to the epicentre of the explosions,” said Bondar, whose academic research team, previously housed at the University of Kyiv, is now with the department of magnetism at the Institute of Geophysics in the Polish Academy of Sciences.

In “The use of remote sensing data for the investigation of environmental consequences of the Russia-Ukraine war” published in 2022, Professor Viktor Vyshnevskyi, an hydrologlist at Ukraine’s National Aviation University (Kyiv), and his two co-authors documented at least 17 incidents of burning oil depots and provided pictures, taken on 23 March 2022, of the four fires the Russians caused at the oil depot in Chernihiv, a city north of Kyiv.

The plume of smoke from fires that resulted from Russian shells or missiles in the south of Ukraine, near where the Dnipro River debouches into the Black Sea, reached 100 km in length, they wrote.

Ukraine’s rich black earth

Ukraine’s land, fresh water and its littoral waters of the Black and Azov seas, as well as the country’s air (at times), have all been severely damaged by the war.

Ukraine’s fecund black earth was once part of the Steppe, the fabled grasslands that stretch to China. Before the Soviets brought in industrial farming, they constituted about 40% of the country’s territory.

However, today, the wild grasslands comprise only about 3% of the country’s unploughed land, making Ukraine one of the most ecologically transformed countries in Europe, said Anna Kuzemko, professor at the MG Kholodny Institute of Botany at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU, Kyiv).

In 2021, the last full year before the war, Ukraine was the world’s third-largest producer of wheat, harvesting 32 million metric tons. It was also the largest producer of sunflower oil.

These two crops alone made Ukraine one of the major contributors of food to a number of African countries, feeding some 400 million people, according to the World Food Programme.

The trenches that form the frontlines, together with soil damage caused by tanks, trucks, bulldozers and half-tracks, have degraded soil in large swaths of the county’s east and south.

Equally damaging, Kuzemko explained, are fires (most caused by Russian shelling and missile attacks) that have destroyed stands of trees and burned crops. A century and half after the Russo-Turkish war, the trenches dug around the city of Pleven, which is now in what is Bulgaria, remain unclaimed by vegetation.

Amidst this scarred landscape are innumerable craters caused by exploding shells and mines. Additionally, within this physical damage lurk poisonous heavy metals and other chemicals left behind by the explosions, said Kusemko.

According to Mykhailo Yatsiuk, director of Ukraine’s Institute of Water Problems and Land Reclamation (UIWPLR), himself a PhD student at Taras National University of Shevchenko Kyiv, chemical ingress into Ukraine’s soil of heavy metals such as sulphur and nitrogen kill soil biota (microorganisms such as fungi and algae), bacteria and nutrients, turning it into “dead earth”.

Groundwater has also been polluted by both chemicals released by explosions and by the industrial complexes which have been damaged by military action or cannot operate as normal.

Minefields cover a quarter of Ukraine

As of February of this year, a quarter of Ukraine, much of it farm land, was made up of minefields.

According to Professor Olena Pareniuk, senior researcher at the Institute for Safety Programs of Nuclear Power Plants at NASU, who is a specialist in radiation ecology, it will take seven centuries to de-mine the 144,000 square kilometre (60,000 square miles or more than twice the area of Ireland) sewn with mines.

“Ukraine is the most mined country in the world. And, unfortunately, we also have unexploded ordnance [shells] and exploded and unexploded missiles on the land,” she said.

Pareniuk expects that some of this land will be designated as “exclusion zones”, as was the area around Chernobyl where she has conducted research.

There is a term for wanton, irreversible destruction of the environment by humans in war – ecocide. It is a term used in the national laws of some countries and has gained the support of the European Parliament.

Campaigners are trying to have ecocide criminalised in the Rome Statute, which concerns international humanitarian law, by first getting it written into EU law, as EU Member States make up 20% of the parties to the Rome Statute.

Although not at liberty to share too many details of her work which involves using satellite technology to determine where to prioritise demining efforts, Pareniuk said “universities and scientific institutions are deeply involved” in the research programme she directs – as well as a number of private companies.

“What we are doing is being done in wartime for the very first time in the world,” she said. “We have an algorithm and are using it to assess each pedestrian plot of land that is economically meaningful for Ukraine. We provide a certain level of prioritisation.

“This requires working with huge amounts of data. We get this from government and private databases that are closed sources. The landowner or user will be able to access this information from a website through an electronic signature or bank identification or something like that,” Pareniuk explained.

The high level of security, she added, is necessary to prevent the information falling into Russian hands.

Bondar’s team is also producing a map of ‘mined Ukraine’ using a drone that flies seven metres above the ground and from which hangs a magnetometer that is a metre off the ground.

“The battlefields are often in agricultural areas, so we have a lot of land that has been bombed, especially in the north and east, that has been recaptured by Ukrainian forces. By sensing the iron oxides and other toxic metals in the soil, the magnetometer can determine the extent of microbial biodegradation because of weapon residue in the soil.

“Once we have determined the level of contamination in the soil, we hand that information over to other professors who plan the decontamination of it,” Bondar said.

Black Sea biodiversity

From the first days of the war, the Emerald Network, established by the Council of Europe in 1989, has been concerned about the decimation of brown algae as well as the declining biodiversity in the Black Sea Basin due to Russian military action.

“The Black Sea is quite a unique marine basin, connected to the Mediterranean through small straits (the Bosphorus and Dardanelles). We study the diversity and the structure of ecosystems in the Black Sea because it is important for understanding the processes inside this marine basin,” said Dr Sofia Sadoguska, a researcher with the Institute of Botany, NASU, who is a member of Ecoaction, a Ukrainian NGO connected to the Emerald Network.

“The basis of the most diverse marine ecosystem is often created by key species, which in the Black Sea is brown algae, particularly of the genome systole,” she noted.

According to Sadoguska, Russian military action, which has included explosions, around the protected reserve of Dzharylhach Island in the north-eastern part of the Black Sea, has damaged the brown algae population, though exactly by how much she could not say because researchers have no access to the area.

By far the greatest riparian and marine damage was caused by the blowing up in the early hours of 6 June 2023 of the Kakhovka Dam by the Russians who had controlled it since late February 2022, according to Pavel Gol’din, a zoology professor at NASU.

Built by Ukrainian and Russian Soviet engineers in the mid-1950s, the dam held back 183 cubic kilometres of water used for irrigation, electrical generation and to cool the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

The massive amounts of water that tore down the Dnipro River course inundated areas downstream, killing 50 people on the Ukrainian side of the river, an unknown number on the Russian side, and flooding or destroying thousands of buildings.

The millions of metric tons of fresh water that reached the Black Sea lessened its salinity until the end of June, leading to fish kills. Laced with biological contaminants – including biogenic substances (from the eight million people for whom the river provided fresh and waste water) and nitrogen and phosphorus (from fertiliser runoff) – the inflow triggered algae blooms in the Black Sea.

“Water sampling in Odesa by the Ukrainian Scientific Center of Ecology of the Sea revealed a significant increase in phytoplankton content, which corresponded with the emergence of green patches of microalgae near the beaches of Odesa Bay [100 miles east of where the Dnipro debouches in to the Black Sea near Kherson] starting from 14 June 2023,” wrote Vyshnevskyi and his four co-authors in The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and its consequences.

The algae blooms resulted in the prohibition for several weeks of swimming on the beaches near Odesa.

Closer to Kherson, researchers found “concentrations of oil products [some from the Kakhovka Dam itself since it was a major hydroelectric station], toxic metals (such as zinc, copper and arsenic [most likely from flooded factories]) and certain chlorogenic compounds (such as lindane and polychlorinated biphenyls – PCBs)”, they wrote.

These chemicals easily enter the food chain, where their concentration grows the higher up the chain one looks. “People who eat seafood or drink water containing high levels of copper or zinc can experience various health problems, including issues with liver, heart, kidneys or [their] nervous system,” Vyshnevskyi and his colleagues wrote.

Ukrainian attacks on the Russian invader have also caused pollution. In “The use of remote sensing data for investigation of environmental consequences of Russia-Ukraine War”, Vyshnevskyi and two colleagues published satellite photos of the oil spill that resulted from the sinking of the flagship of the Black Sea fleet, the cruiser Moskva, on 14 April 2022.

Two months later, a Ukrainian missile set alight a drilling platform that supplied Russian forces with natural gas.

The fire “continued for some months and during that time Russia couldn’t or didn’t want to extinguish the fire”, which polluted both the air and the sea, Vyshnevskyi and his colleagues wrote.

Deep water species

Like humans, deep water species in the Black Sea are not immune from the machines of war and the pollution they cause.

Among the threats are the thousands of sea mines Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces let loose in the north-western part of the Black Sea in his efforts to bottle up Ukraine’s shipments of grain to Istanbul, from where it was transhipped to Africa and Asia.

Speaking of a video posted to Telegram on 8 September that showed children playing with a sea mine on a beach near Soichi, Russia, hundreds of miles to the south east of Ukraine’s shipping lanes, Gol’din, said: “This mine was drifting for months, maybe more than a year. It reached the other side of the Black Sea.”

Gol’din explained: “This is quite dangerous not only for shipping and humans but also for dolphins and other marine life because the mines can explode. This can occur now, several years from now, or even decades after the war.”

Even eight decades after the end of the Second World War, mines continue to wash up on the beaches of Normandy and, in the Baltic, break free of their chains and float to the surface.

According to Gol’din the sea floor below the main shipping routes from Odesa is littered with bombs Russian planes dropped on ships carrying Ukrainian grain.

“These bombs can explode at any time,” Gol’din told University World News.

Kalibr cruise missiles, many of which have destroyed university buildings, apartment blocks and Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure, are a more high-tech hazard. They are often launched from submarines approximately 50 metres below the surface of the Black Sea.

There are two stages to these missiles’ launch. First, they are pushed out of the submarine by a blast of highly compressed air; once they break the surface, their rocket motors ignite.

Each of these causes a sonic event that is, at best, extremely disturbing to dolphins and porpoises and, at worst, damaging to their “highly sensitive hearing”, part of their natural sonar-like navigational system, Gol’din explained.

A further danger to marine life is highly toxic missile fuel. Possibly, between 20% and 25% of launches are failures, which means that the toxic fuel remains unburnt. The fuel is so highly toxic that the personnel who fuel some types of missiles, even though they wear HAZMAT suits, still report feeling intoxicated, said Gol’din.

Since the killing of dolphins occurs beyond the area Ukraine can monitor, Gol’din’s team is developing an algorithm that would allow them to extrapolate the number with an acceptable degree of accuracy.

Before answering a question about whether he thought the Russians are purposely killing dolphins, Gol’din doffed his professor’s gown and put on a lawyer’s robe.

“That’s a good question for an attorney in court. Everybody knows that dolphins are a protected species, and that they may be affected by underwater noise and pollution. Russia, as well as Ukraine and all other countries, is part of international conventions about the protection of biodiversity. There are more or less clear criteria that are listed in these conventions.

“I can believe that a soldier or naval commander may not be aware of them and about all of the environmental effects of military actions. But the government of Russia would be and is responsible because they are clearly aware of the possible consequences of these actions,” said Gol’din.

Impact on sustainable development

Though none of the scientists and professors interviewed for this article referred to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), their work can be understood as part of this internationally recognised framework for tackling local and global challenges.

The concerns at the heart of SDG 15 (Life on Land) animate the research of Bondar, Vyshnevskyi, Yatsiuk and Kuzemko and are also at the heart of the work of Darya Tsymbalyuk, assistant professor of environmental humanities at the University of Chicago.

The grey smoke that rises from collapsed buildings, she said, is filled with asbestos, a dangerous, naturally occurring mineral that had been widely used as a fire retardant. Exposure to even small numbers of asbestos fibres, which are breathed deep into the lungs, can, decades later, cause asbestosis.

“Ukraine used to import quite a lot of asbestos from Russia. It was banned a few years ago. But something like 70% of the roofs in Ukraine have asbestos,” said Tsymbalyuk. Asbestos was also widely used for firebreaks in buildings built between the 1920s and early 2000s.

“When buildings are blown up, asbestos fibres are released into the air and are, of course, in the rubble. To work with asbestos now there are many international precautions that must be followed.

“Of course, none of these can be taken by firefighters, people searching for survivors in the rubble, by people trapped in rubble – or by people downwind from the explosion who breathe in the contaminated air,” she said.

Yatsiuk’s doctoral work comes under SDGs 14 (Live below Water), as evidenced by the title of his PhD thesis: Scientific principles of establishing water security in Ukraine in the conditions of military-technogenic load.

A number of projects undertaken at the (UIWPLR) over the past five years align with SDG 13 (Climate Action). These include “Development of integrated natural resource management combined approach for lands in arid conditions” and “Technology needs assessment for climate change adaptation: Barrier analysis and enabling framework” – both financially underwritten by donors such as the United Nations Environment Program, Yatsiuk wrote in an email.

Yatsiuk told University World News that the institute provides training to graduate students who are part of international projects and that it works with scientists at a number of universities, including at Georgia Technical University (Atlanta); Ohio State University (Columbus), University of California, Berkeley; Wageningen University & Research (Netherlands); and Mula Stk Koçman Üniversitesi (Mula, Türkiye).

Gol’din’s, Bondar’s, and part of Vyshnevskyi’s research falls under SDG 14.

Sadoguska’s research on black algae also aligns with SDG 14, while what she said about the impact of burning oil depots and forest fires can be understood in terms of SDGs 13 and 15.

Air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are not merely local effects of Russia’s war against Ukraine, she explained, by pointing to the fact that the war has caused airlines to change their flight paths.

“Ukraine’s airspace is closed, which means that aeroplanes have to change their routes, which makes them longer, producing additional greenhouse gases,” Sadoguska said. She also told University World News that research is ongoing into the additional greenhouse gases that will be produced by rebuilding Ukraine (from such things as the creation of concrete).

Adrian Ivakhiv, JS Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University (Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada), sets Russian aggression in an additional context that academics must consider: SDG 2 – No hunger.

Facing the economic reality that the days are numbered for Russia’s fossil fuel-dependent economy, Ivakhiv said, Putin opted to re-imperialise, resurrecting what he believed was “the glorious past of Russia”. Part of this project is his war to forcibly reincorporate Ukraine into Russia.

In addition to Putin’s ideological belief in the idea that Ukraine is part of Russia is a realpolitik argument: re-incorporating Ukraine into Russia would give the Kremlin control over millions of hectares of fertile black earth.

That, as Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues, would allow Russia to control a large percentage of the world’s food production, effectively allowing Putin to “blackmail” the world, Ivakhiv said.

Indeed, last year the European Parliament put out a short paper entitled “Russia’s use of grain as blackmail”, which said in part: “By deliberately causing a food shortage and thus increasing migration to Europe, Russia wants to be at the forefront of diplomatic efforts and an indispensable part of the solution to the problems created by its own aggression. By destabilising the grain market in the European Union, the Kremlin is stoking public discontent, and this is resulting in a decline in support for Ukraine.”

The end of collaboration

The biological ecosphere is not the only thing Russian missiles and tanks have torn asunder. Putin’s war has also torn apart the academic ecosphere in which these scientists and professors came of age, a central feature of which was academic partnerships with Russian ecologists.

Before the war Gol’din was in contact with Russian scientists studying their side of the Black Sea. Since the full-scale invasion he has had no contact with them.

Bondar, who worked closely with Russian scientists conducting archaeological surveys in Georgia before 2014, when the Russians invaded Crimea and Russian-backed militias seized control of large parts of the Donbass, said over the course of more than a decade, only one Russian scientist remained pro-Ukrainian while in all of her other Russian colleagues she observed a step-by-step change in their views about Ukraine.

As early as 2010 she knew Russians who were afraid to come to Ukraine because they believed “the propaganda that it is dangerous to come to Ukraine”, she told University World News.

What, she was asked, could explain the process by which scientists who were trained to think critically and evaluate data dispassionately could buy into the Kremlin’s anti-Ukraine propaganda?

“One of the more important things you must realise is that the former USSR people, Russians, experienced almost 100 years of negative [social] selection,” Bondar answered, referring to what she believed to be the impact of “the … people who were well-educated, who were active, [being] killed or sent to the interior labour punishment camps in [the Gulag] in Asia”.

Gol’din considers his earlier contacts with Russian scientists as now “absolutely irrelevant”. He said their conduct on the battlefield and the environmental damage they cause is “suicidal”.

“There is no pre-war realm anymore, and the pre-war context no longer exists,” said Gol’din, who went on to say that important biological collections have been destroyed by fires or the flood caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam.

“Ecology,” he continued, “mostly falls out of their [the Russians’] focus.”