 "Environmental damage in Ukraine has been massive because of the ongoing war with Russia. AP")
As the war in Ukraine grinds through its fourth devastating year, Ukrainian authorities are mounting a rare legal campaign that could shape the future of international criminal law – charging Russia with ecocide. Defined broadly as the deliberate and widespread destruction of the environment, ecocide is increasingly seen not just as collateral damage, but as a war crime deserving global accountability.
This campaign, spearheaded by Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General, is compiling hundreds of cases documenting the massive environmental fallout of Russia’s military invasion. According to The New York Times’ reporting by Brendan Hoffman and Evelina Riabenko, Ukraine is now pursuing 247 cases of environmental war crimes — 14 of which are categorised under ecocide, a crime enshrined in Ukraine’s criminal code. From Kyiv’s courtrooms to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, Ukraine is building a far-reaching legal case to address the environmental toll of war.
Prosecuting ecocide in international court
Despite the sheer magnitude of the environmental toll, the path to holding Russia legally accountable remains fraught. As quoted by The New York Times, Maksym Popov, a special adviser on environmental crimes at Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office, said, “Nobody has done it before.” The attempt to classify ecological devastation as an international crime of war and prosecute it as “ecocide” is still largely untested.
Ukrainian officials estimate the financial damage from Russia’s environmental war crimes at over $85 billion.
Andriy Kostin, Ukraine’s former prosecutor general and one of the key architects of the ecocide legal campaign, acknowledged that actual prosecution of Russian officials is unlikely in the near term. But he emphasised that even convictions in absentia would significantly bolster Ukraine’s claims for reparations in international tribunals.
From soil to sky
Explosive residue from millions of artillery shells has contaminated some of the world’s most fertile soil, known as “chernozem” or black earth. These soils, central to Ukraine’s agricultural economy, have been poisoned by heavy metals and chemical residue from constant shelling, mirroring contamination still found in battlefields from World War I in France, as noted by soil expert Naomi Rintoul-Hynes of Canterbury Christ Church University.
Impact Shorts
View AllIn one area southeast of Kharkiv alone, scientists documented more than 30,000 artillery craters across 150 square miles — a phenomenon described by experts as “bombturbation”, the mechanical churning of soil through warfare. These impacts introduce toxins that could render cropland unsafe for generations, eroding Ukraine’s agricultural foundation.
Meanwhile, forests, particularly in eastern Ukraine, have burned uncontrollably. The New York Times revealed that in many zones, wildfires sparked by fighting or deliberately set to flush out soldiers have destroyed hundreds, possibly thousands, of square miles of woodland. Environmental damage from these fires is estimated at $18 billion, with the 2024 fire season already declared the worst on record — more than 7,000 wildfires were recorded on a single day, September 7.
The smoke and pollutants released from burning fuel tanks, industrial plants and vegetation contribute to air pollution that spans national boundaries, while heavily mined zones prevent any meaningful firefighting response.
The Kakhovka catastrophe
Perhaps the single most devastating environmental blow came in June 2023 with the destruction of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro river. A New York Times investigation concluded that Russia was most likely behind the sabotage although the Kremlin has denied this and accused Ukraine of targeting its own infrastructure.
The dam’s destruction unleashed a torrent of toxic water downstream and drained an enormous reservoir that once provided irrigation across southern Ukraine.
The collapse dried out vast tracts of farmland with sunflower yields in nearby villages dropping to just 10 per cent of the previous year’s output. The disruption of irrigation networks, sediment displacement and the influx of freshwater into the salty Black Sea during a sensitive marine reproductive period also dealt a critical blow to coastal ecosystems.
Groundwater contamination
In the Donbas region, another form of environmental degradation is playing out beneath the surface. As Russian forces advanced and took control of several ageing coal mines, most were shuttered hastily, allowing groundwater to flood into them and leach toxic substances like heavy metals and sulphates. This pollution then flows into rivers, spreads into agricultural soil and renders drinking water unsafe.
The damage builds upon a water infrastructure already weakened from fighting since 2014, which forced civilians to resort to backyard wells. The mixing of different water tables due to these makeshift wells has compounded the contamination problem, experts report.
Price of war on wildlife and ecosystems
Ukraine’s wildlife has also been collateral damage in this war. Conservationists have tracked the collapse of once-thriving animal populations and rising disease among species. In many war-affected areas, hunting was restricted, allowing populations of foxes, wild boar and wolves to spike.
According to Viktor Chervonyi of the All-Ukrainian Association of Hunters as reported by The New York Times, the fox population in one region increased fivefold — and nearly one-fifth of those foxes were rabid due to disrupted vaccination campaigns.
Further south, a colony of flamingos that had fled fighting in Kherson and Crimea settled in the Tuzlovsky Lagoons National Nature Park. Marine life hasn’t been spared either. An estimated up to 50,000 dolphins may have died in 2022, likely due to sonar emitted by Russian naval ships.
War’s boomerang: Environmental fallout in Russia
The environmental consequences of the war are not confined to Ukraine. Though largely absent from Ukrainian legal efforts, Russian territory has also suffered ecological consequences — often from Ukraine’s own counterstrikes. Ukrainian forces have targeted Russian oil refineries and fuel depots sparking enormous fires and releasing plumes of smoke.
Ukraine has not initiated legal proceedings related to environmental harm on Russian soil and The New York Times reporters acknowledged the limitations of their reporting in Russian-held or Russian territory. Nonetheless, the reciprocal destruction highlights that environmental warfare, like all warfare, leaves no side untouched.
War undermines Russia’s climate efforts
Since the onset of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has witnessed a significant decline in environmental protection and climate-related governance, as detailed by a report in The Moscow Times on February 23, 2024.
The geopolitical fallout — notably Western sanctions and domestic repression of civil society — not only disrupted Russia’s decarbonisation trajectory but also raised doubts about its ability to fulfill its net-zero goals by 2060.
The Russian Academy of Sciences cautioned that by mid-century, emission reductions could be halved compared to earlier projections due to a heavy reliance on now-restricted Western technologies.
The weakening of environmental regulations also has had tangible consequences. To cushion the blow of sanctions on its industrial base, Russia permitted the production of vehicles under the archaic “ecological class 0” emission standard, roughly equivalent to Euro 1 — a framework abandoned by the EU decades ago.
This rollback allowed a flood of high-emission vehicles onto Russian roads, increasing public health risks linked to nitrogen oxide exposure. The report said that the militarisation of the economy contributed to a record 9 billion tonnes of industrial waste in 2022, the highest in two decades.
Drone restrictions across dozens of regions have also undercut essential forestry monitoring — particularly for detecting wildfires, illegal logging and waste dumping. The Moscow Times also raised serious doubts whether the country can uphold credible climate action or contribute meaningfully to global sustainability efforts.
Will the world acknowledge ecocide?
Ukraine’s efforts to build a legal case against Russia for ecocide may be unprecedented, but they are far from symbolic. They reflect an urgent and growing recognition that modern warfare wreaks devastation not just on people and cities, but also on the natural world — with consequences that can stretch across decades and borders.
Whether the international community will embrace ecocide as a prosecutable war crime remains to be seen. For Ukraine, however, the goal is clear: justice for a wounded landscape and recognition that the environment is a victim of war and deserves a voice in its aftermath.