The War on Nature in Ukraine
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 carefully 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 mass 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 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
What was once a fish farm at the junction of the Konka River and the Kakhovka reservoir has become dry, cracked dirt.
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 Dnipro 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,” said Serhii Buhay, 52, 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 a 10th 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 New York 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 now 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
Serhii Lymanskyi, director of the Chalk Flora Nature Preserve, looking at military trenches there. He says it will take the land “more than 100 years” to fully recover.
Ukraine boasts some of the world’s most fertile soil, called “chernozem,” black earth. The black earth is “the king of soils,” says Sviatoslav Baliuk, director of the O.N. Sokolovsky Institute for Soil Science and Agrochemistry Research in Kharkiv. 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 percent of a Ukrainian national park, the Chalk Flora Reserve, is damaged by trenchwork 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
Mines laid in the forest near Dolyna in eastern Ukraine made a wildfire there inaccessible to firefighters.
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
Skeletons from dolphins that have washed up on the Black Sea shore. Ivan Rusev, head of a nature park there, estimated that up to 50,000 dolphins may have been killed in 2022. He blamed Russian sonar.
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 percent 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,” Mr. 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, Mr. Rusev estimated 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
A destroyed building in Pavlohrad, in eastern Ukraine. After the war, there will be an environmental cost to disposing of rubble from the more than 210,000 buildings that have been destroyed.
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 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 percent of Ukraine’s public and residential buildings.
Ukraine wants environmental protections included in any peace agreement, but the Trump administration’s friendlier ties with Moscow 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.”
Europe Has Economic Power. Can It Use It Against Trump’s Tariffs?
Europe Has Economic Power. Can It Use It Against Trump’s Tariffs?
European leaders have said they would prefer to negotiate. If that fails, their response could go beyond anything they’ve tried before.
The European Union, taken as a whole, is America’s biggest trading partner. That makes President Trump’s fresh tariffs especially painful for the 27-nation bloc — but also gives it a uniquely large amount of economic weight to throw around in response.
In the hours after Mr. Trump’s sweeping tariff announcement on Wednesday, European leaders began to make clear that they plan to do so.
Among the options: to impose trade barriers on U.S. services firms, in particular giant technology companies like Google who do a huge amount of E.U. business. And policymakers are already finalizing lists of jacked-up tariffs that could go into effect as soon as mid-April. Member state representatives are expected to vote on them next week, a senior European official said on Thursday, speaking anonymously to brief reporters.
Officials could add to those lists in the coming weeks, in response to both auto tariffs and Mr. Trump’s freshly announced 20 percent levy on the European Union. They have not yet committed to a specific plan.
Commenting on the new U.S. tariffs early Thursday morning, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the E.U. executive arm, said, “There seems to be no order in the disorder, no clear path to the complexity and chaos that is being created,” adding that Europeans felt “let down by our oldest ally.”
The European Union was built around free trade and cooperation, and its leaders remain adamant that tariffs are bad for everyone. Europe is still trying to push for active discussions, and the E.U. trade commissioner said on social media on Thursday that he would speak to his U.S. counterparts tomorrow.
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Israel Shifts Goal Posts in Gaza War
Israel’s leaders have articulated various goals for the expanding war in Gaza, spreading confusion over how the objectives might be achieved and on what terms the renewed campaign might end.
The primary aim is to squeeze Hamas into releasing the dozens of remaining hostages in Gaza. But other goals have emerged.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had “moved up a gear” in Gaza, capturing more territory, hitting militants and carving up the enclave. He reiterated his ultimate goals of crushing Hamas’s military capabilities and terminating its rule over Gaza, neither of which have been achieved in more than a year of war.
The defense minister, Israel Katz, said a day earlier that the military was seizing more territory to protect its forces and border towns, suggesting the possibility of a longer-term presence.
And over the weekend, Mr. Netanyahu said Israel would enable what he described as the voluntary emigration of Gazans, without clarifying where they would go.
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For years, Myanmar’s army chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, has been treated like a pariah on the global stage.
General Min Aung Hlaing has made few overseas trips, other than to Russia and China, since he seized power in a coup in 2021. Long the subject of Western sanctions, he has been barred from attending meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, of which Myanmar is a member, because of his military’s failure to implement an agreed peace plan in the country’s civil war. An arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court last November accusing him of crimes against humanity was supposed to isolate him further.
But on Friday, General Min Aung Hlaing began talks in Bangkok at a regional summit of a group of seven countries around the Bay of Bengal that also includes India and Thailand. He had planned to discuss ways that other countries could provide relief for the March 28 earthquake in Myanmar that killed over 3,000 people.
On Thursday, the day of his arrival in Bangkok, his military launched multiple airstrikes in Kachin State, Karenni State and the Sagaing region in Myanmar despite his call for a cease-fire, according to a spokesman for the Kachin Independence Army rebel group, an activist in Sagaing and an aid worker in Karenni.
Myanmar’s military has come under fierce criticism for continuing its airstrikes in the ongoing civil war and impeding the flow of aid in the days after the quake.
For the general, the Bangkok visit — his first to a Southeast Asian nation since April 2021 — will give his regime the international attention it has long desired. For the Thai government, which is already sheltering tens of thousands of refugees from Myanmar in camps along the border, stable relations with the military government could be aimed at trying to manage the flow of new arrivals.
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The day after President Trump antagonized world leaders across the globe with his most sweeping set of tariffs yet, he was scheduled to fly to Florida and potentially see the one leader he has called his “favorite president.”
That leader, President Javier Milei of Argentina, had flown overnight to receive an award on Thursday at a right-wing gala at Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Trump was scheduled to also be there late Thursday — Mr. Milei said Mr. Trump would receive an award, too — and Mr. Milei said he hoped the two would meet.
It was Mr. Milei’s 10th trip to the United States in 15 months as president, and nearly every time, he has met Mr. Trump or Elon Musk.
Mr. Trump has posited that he is reshuffling U.S. foreign policy strictly around what is good for the United States.
So what can be puzzling about his elevation of Argentina to the front row of America’s allies — Mr. Milei and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy were the only world leaders onstage at Mr. Trump’s inauguration — is that the chronically distressed South American nation is not particularly important as an economic or geopolitical partner.
Instead, through Mr. Milei, Argentina has offered Mr. Trump something else he appears to crave: adoration.
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