The Silent Victim of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

As Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 1,700 tanks, trucks, and other heavy vehicles are estimated to have plodded through the highly radioactive mud and dirt of the Ukrainian Chernobyl exclusion zone. On top of stirring up nuclear hell itself, Russian troops actually hunkered down in not only the defunct nuclear plant, but dug trenches and camped throughout the 1,000-square-mile “exclusion zone” that demarcates the most dangerously radioactive soil on the planet.

There is perhaps no starker a picture of how incredibly environmentally reckless — or ignorant — Russian troops have been as they attack Ukraine.

The head of the exclusion zone state agency, Yevhen Kramarenko, told reporters on Wednesday that, during its five-week siege of the zone, the Russians had dug trenches and made shelters for their vehicles in an area known as the Red Forest — a 1.5-square-mile forest that died as a result of the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown. Needless to say, not only was radioactive dust and dirt kicked up, endangering the lives of Ukranians, but young Russian soldiers may find later in life that the soil has, and will, make them sick.

“We believe they will feel the consequences of the radiation they received,” said Yevhen Kramarenko, head of the exclusion zone state agency. “Some sooner, some later.”

The Red Forest remains the most contaminated part of the exclusion zone, according to Reuters.

“Historians may describe what happened around Chernobyl as a case of imperial hubris,” Luke Harding wrote in The Guardian.

But, while radioactive fallout is terrifying, there are many other long-term consequences to the disruption of Ukraine’s “ecological transition zone,” full of rare species and wetlands, that are already taking root — and will continue to occur — because of conflict. Research on past conflicts predicts that the war in Ukraine could have a “profound” environmental impact, the New York Times’s Emily Anthes reports.

Researchers have studied war’s effects on the environment and climate change for decades, and their findings are far from encouraging.

“The environment is the silent victim of conflicts,” Doug Weir, the research and policy director at the U.K.-based Conflict and Environment Observatory, told The New York Times this week.

Not only are militaries rarely ever under environmental oversight (if ever), they expend a tremendous amount of pollution from weapons creation, to callous invasions. Arms production and the military supply chain “plays a significant role in the carbon cost of war,” the observatory says.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute says that, in 2019, sales by the world’s largest 25 arms producers reached an estimated $361 billion, a nearly 9 percent increase compared to 2018. And all of these sales incur a carbon cost, whether though mining of minerals or the eventual disposal of the unused weapons.

“Each sale has its individual carbon cost, from the extraction of raw materials, through to production by arms companies, the use by militaries, decommissioning and end-of-life disposal,” according to the observatory.

Wars also typically alter ecosystems for decades after destroying habitats, killing wildlife and generating massive amounts of pollution.

Both the military buildup and the short- and long-term impacts from the fighting in Ukraine will create greenhouse gas emissions, the observatory says, adding that this is just the beginning of war’s consequences for climate change. “Reconstruction, when it comes, will be a further and significant carbon cost made necessary by the conflict.”

So while the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to devastate a country’s people and cities, such aggression is also destroying something that has been here much longer than our human lives. A healthy environment needs to continue to exist, so that we can too.

“Humans are generally disruptive,” Robert Pringle, a biologist at Princeton University, told The Times, “and that includes their conflicts.”