In Ukraine, war takes poisonous toll on soil, air and water

The human costs of Russia's war in Ukraine are enormous, measured in mass graves, nightly missile attacks, traumatized children and hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead or wounded.

But Ukraine's environment is also being devastated. The war may end, but damage from artillery shells, mines, drones and missiles will endure for decades, experts say, degrading industries like farming and mining, introducing health risks and eroding natural beauty.

Fields are pocked with shell craters, their soil contaminated with the residue of explosives. Burning fuel tanks spew pollution into the air and wildfires burn unchecked in combat zones. Water from reservoirs has poured through destroyed dams, causing droughts upstream and damaging floods below.

As the war enters its fourth year, Ukrainian authorities are collecting evidence of a new type of war crime known as ecocide.

As genocide is to people, ecocide is to the environment. Ukraine is mounting an extensive legal effort to seek justice for ecological harm, in Ukrainian courts and the International Criminal Court. Prosecutors are pursuing 247 cases of environmental war crimes against Russia.

These are rare legal efforts. "Nobody has done it before," said Maksym Popov, special adviser on environmental crimes in the prosecutor general's office.

Prosecutors classify 14 of the 247 cases as ecocide under Ukraine's criminal code because of the specifics of the damage, such as destruction of flora and fauna. Ukrainian officials put the total environmental cost at more than $85 billion.

The chances of prosecuting Russians in person seem small, since there is almost no prospect that Russia would cooperate. But Ukraine is determined to establish accountability. "Evidence collected within criminal cases and court verdicts, even if issued in absentia, will strengthen Ukraine's compensation claims," said Andriy Kostin, who was a driving force behind the effort as Ukraine's prosecutor general from 2022 to 2024.

Russia's Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

To report the ecological damage caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, New York Times journalists visited the front line and the surrounding areas over four months, interviewing more than three dozen people including military officials, environmental experts and local administrators.

The picture is inevitably incomplete. It was not possible to visit Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, for instance. And Ukraine is not trying to document the environmental damage its military has caused in Russia, where it has targeted oil refineries, setting off infernos that send plumes of black smoke into the sky.

Water

One of the war's most devastating blows to Ukraine's environment occurred in June 2023 when the Kakhovka dam, holding back a reservoir almost as large as Utah's Great Salt Lake, was blown up. The breach unleashed a deluge down the Dnieper River, sending toxic sediments and trillions of gallons of fresh water into the salty Black Sea, and wrecking coastal ecosystems during a peak reproductive period for marine organisms.

The reservoir had provided irrigation for much of southern Ukraine. Soon, farmland in the region began to dry up.

"It was beautiful," Serhii Buhay, 52, said from his back patio in the village of Malokaterynivka, where he used to enjoy a view of the reservoir. "One day everything changed. There's nothing left."

Sunflower harvests produced only one-tenth of what they had delivered the previous year, said Serhii Verhovskyi, 38, a farmer in the village of Pershe Travnya, about 10 miles from the reservoir. "We really need water; we need it badly. This season has brought many farmers to their knees."

A Times investigation found that Russia was most likely responsible for the attack on the dam. At the time, Russia accused Ukraine of having sabotaged the dam itself, and in general the Kremlin has denied its forces commit war crimes.

From an ecological perspective, the dam has long been considered controversial. The filling of the reservoir in 1956, and subsequent transformation of arid grasslands into fertile farmland, disrupted native ecosystems, some experts contend, and many ecologists say the dam should not be rebuilt.

Elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, it is the groundwater that is at risk from the war.

The region is dotted with coal mines, dozens of which have fallen under Russia's control as its forces advanced across the Donbas. Occupation authorities mostly shuttered the outdated mines rather than continue to subsidize them.

Experts fear those mines were closed haphazardly, allowing groundwater to flood their tunnels and caverns and leach toxins. Such damage makes groundwater from wells undrinkable and eventually reaches rivers, polluting surface water and then soil.

The collapse of water infrastructure in the Donbas in the earlier phase of the war from 2014 to 2022 -- evident in damaged pipes and water treatment plants -- led people to drill backyard wells. Hundreds of these now mix water layers, spreading contaminants from the mines.

Earth

Ukraine boasts some of the world's most fertile soil, called "chernozem," black earth. The black earth is "the king of soils," said Sviatoslav Baliuk, director of the O.N. Sokolovsky Institute for Soil Science and Agrochemistry Research in Kharkiv, Ukraine. This soil lies under much of the battlefield.

Millions of artillery shells release explosive residue into the air and soil. It has been a problem in past wars. "Even a century after World War I, soil in France is still contaminated with heavy metals above safe levels for humans," Naomi Rintoul-Hynes, a soil expert at Canterbury Christ Church University in England, said in an email, "particularly if crops are grown" on sites of major battles.

The risk of contamination in food crops will linger from heavy metals and other pollutants, harming Ukraine's agriculture, one of its most important businesses.

More ecological fallout comes from the disturbance of the soil caused by powerful explosives and the digging of trenches and other fortifications. In one zone, 30,000 artillery shell craters pocked a 150-square mile area southeast of Kharkiv. Scientists use the term "bombturbation" to describe this process of mechanical damage.

About 10 per cent of a Ukrainian national park, the Chalk Flora Reserve, is damaged by trenches dug by Ukrainian soldiers. "It will take more than 100 years" to restore it to its previous state, said Serhii Lymanskyi, director of the park.

Air

At a military checkpoint in eastern Ukraine last fall, a soldier gestured toward smoke rising beside the road ahead: A wildfire was burning through a minefield. At closer range you could hear the crackling of the flames mixed with pops and bangs of exploding mines.

Some of the fiercest fighting that has swept through the Donbas has taken place amid tinder-dry pine forests. While explosives spark some fires accidentally, others are intentionally set to flush soldiers from hiding places. The presence of mines means that leaving paved roads to fight fires is out of the question, so the blazes burn uncontrolled.

Centuries of forestry mismanagement, allowing logging and replanting of tightly spaced trees, are exacerbating the blazes, said Brian Milakovsky, an American forestry expert who lived in eastern Ukraine for years before the invasion. "Without exaggeration, pine forests are disappearing" from parts of the east because of wildfires, he said.

Studies show that hundreds and possibly thousands of square miles of forest have burned since Russia's invasion. One report estimated the damage at $18 billion.

After a hot, dry summer, Ukraine's 2024 fire season was the worst on record, with more than 7,000 active fires recorded just on Sept. 7.

Nuclear contamination is another concern. Early in the invasion, an attack on a nuclear research center in the eastern city of Kharkiv led to what is so far the only case of ecocide filed against named Russian commanders -- five colonels and generals accused of ordering the missile strikes. The facility sustained damage from more than 100 points of impact, but no radiation leaked, officials said.

In February, a drone struck a protective shield at the Chernobyl nuclear facility. Ukraine described it as a deliberate Russian attack, an accusation the Kremlin denied. No radiation leaks were detected, but experts are studying the damage before undertaking repairs.

Wildlife

As a cold drizzle fell one early December morning, about two dozen men donned fluorescent vests, split into two groups, and fanned out through the forest.

Despite the congenial atmosphere, their mission was serious: to cull wild boar, roe deer, foxes and wolves, all of which have proliferated during three years of war because of tight restrictions on hunting. The population explosions helped spread diseases such as rabies.

Despite being heavily stacked in the hunters' favor, the attempt at culling that morning was not successful. Few shots were even fired.

Viktor Chervonyi, president of the All-Ukrainian Association of Hunters and Hunting Grounds, cited statistics showing a fivefold increase in the fox population in one region.

A recent cull there showed 20 per cent were rabid, the result of a breakdown in rabies control efforts.

Ukrainian news outlets have reported on both civilians and soldiers dying of rabies, though official statistics are unavailable. Rabies vaccination campaigns for wildlife have been limited by wartime hindrances such as mined forests and grounded flights.

The fate of a colony of flamingos provides another cautionary tale. After fighting disturbed their nesting grounds in the Kherson region and Crimea, they settled in 2023 in the Tuzlovsky Lagoons National Nature Park along the Black Sea coast.

"Last year was relatively successful, with about 200 chicks" born in the park, said Ivan Rusev, the head of the park's scientific department, referring to the 2023 nesting season. He was optimistic about 2024 after spotting more than 1,500 flamingos and 400 nests.

Their new home, however, was underneath an area where low-flying Russian drones zoomed into Ukraine from the Black Sea.

"When flamingos hear these drones, they leave their nests," Rusev said. "During this time, the yellow-legged gulls, which are very aggressive birds, come in and steal the eggs, ultimately destroying the colony. Not a single chick survived."

It was not only flamingos that suffered. Extrapolating from his findings and data shared by colleagues in other Black Sea countries, Rusev estimated that up to 50,000 dolphins may have been killed in 2022. He blamed sonar from Russian warships.

"How much does the destruction of endemic species cost?" asked Ruslan Strilets, a former environment minister. "We can't calculate the price."

The Future

Even after the war, there will be an environmental cost to disposing of rubble from the more than 210,000 buildings that have been destroyed. Early efforts are being made at rubble recycling in several cities near the capital, Kyiv.

The programs, however, remain small-scale and have been complicated by bureaucratic hurdles and difficulties separating reusable debris from unexploded ordnance or asbestos. Asbestos was built into an estimated 70 per cent of Ukraine's public and residential buildings.

Ukraine wants environmental protections included in any peace agreement, but the Trump administration's friendlier ties with Russia leave Kyiv little leverage.

Iryna Vykhrystiuk, the director of Tuzlovsky Lagoons National Park, worries that an end to the war would bring a different set of economic and environmental problems. "There will be cries of, 'We lost some areas, we have mined territories, let us plow everything up,'" she said.

"Against the backdrop of these immense losses," she added, "we need to seek out any fragments of living nature and protect them."