The environment is a silent victim of wars, quotes University researcher Freek Van der Vet Secretary General of the UN Ban Ki Moon. This has been the case for a long time, and current wars are an increasingly complex problem for the environment, said the secretary general at the time (you will move to another service) in 2014, when Russia went to war in eastern Ukraine.
Although the consequences of wars for nature are long-lasting and multidimensional, they usually disappear from the headlines quickly when the war is over, adds Van der Vet.
He is worried that it will happen this time as well, although according to him, Ukraine has made the environmental effects of Russia’s war of aggression well known internationally. This war is also one of the first to collect comprehensive up-to-date research data.
Van der Vet heads the University of Helsinki Toxic Crimes project (you will switch to another service). As the name suggests, the project focuses on toxic crimes, i.e. how the environment should be protected by the law in armed conflicts as well, not only as a component of the health and economic effects on people.
War destroys and pollutes the environment in two ways: either directly, when armies use pesticides as a warfare strategy, or indirectly, when bombed industrial areas or explosives left in the soil leak toxins that contaminate land and water supplies.
Toxic Crimes project of the University of Helsinki
Ukraine, especially its eastern side, is famous for its soft black soil, chernozem. Its abundant organic matter provides excellent conditions especially for the production of grain and oil crops.
The promise of humus-rich soil was noticed thousands of years ago by Europe’s earliest farmers. With skills that were spreading from the Middle East to Europe, they grew emmer and einkorn wheat, barley and legumes.
In modern Europe, Ukraine became a “breadbasket” or “granary”. Instead of the low-yielding emmer and emmer wheat, the bread wheat born from the offspring of the emmer and the eastern hay plant, the gluten-rich bun material familiar even to Finns, waves in the fields.
Before Russia’s full-scale attack, 41 percent of Ukraine’s export earnings came from agricultural products, says 2021 statistics (you switch to another service). Ukraine has been the world’s fifth largest exporter of wheat and third largest exporter of corn.
Clearing mines from Ukraine is a huge challenge, but even more difficult to clean are the consequences of war hidden in the soil.
When Ukraine had recaptured the Kherson region from Russian forces last November, the Ukrainian Soil and Agrochemical Research Institute was able to take soil samples from the surroundings of the city of Kharkiv.
The samples contained large amounts of arsenic, mercury and other toxic substances that come from ammunition and war machine fuel, the news agency reports For Reuters (you will switch to another service) newly presented results.
Combined with satellite images, they mean that the war has so far scarred a quarter of Ukraine’s arable land, researchers estimate.
The most common heavy metal that ends up in the environment from military operations is lead. It also causes the worst health effects, along with cadmium and mercury.
Satellite images show how the tanks have trampled the fields and the explosions have torn them apart.
Plants are not able to push their roots into soil that is too densely packed, and microbes do not get nutrients in the normal way when the ecosystem is disturbed, the Ukrainian researchers list.
Before the war, Ukraine produced 60–89 million tons of grain per year. As a result of the war, production may be up to 20 million tons less in the future, estimates the director of the research institute Sviatoslav Baliuk.
Ukraine’s environment was by no means clean and unworn even before the war.
World Bank (you switch to another service) reported in 2014 a strong decline in chernozem due to poor soil management for decades.
According to the World Bank, hundreds of millions of tons of soil had been lost from farmland every year, and there was clear evidence that erosion was still accelerating. In southeastern Ukraine, the soil had already eroded to a desert-like state, the report said.
At the same time, the depletion of organic matter reduces the soil’s ability to stay moist, which is an additional challenge combined with climate change.
Climate change in Ukraine had meant longer and more frequent drought periods during the previous 15 years, which tested fields in the traditionally most productive areas, the World Bank reported almost a decade ago.
When Russia started a full-scale war of aggression in February of last year, the war in eastern Ukraine had been going on for eight years. Freek Van der Vet has been monitoring the environmental effects of the war since 2020.
The fighting had environmental consequences even then, mainly in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine, but the pollution had not really started from ground zero, says Van der Vet.
Eastern Ukraine has long been a heavily polluted area. How much of the pollution measured now is just an additional effect of the war? Answering that is not easy.
– There is a lot of industry in eastern Ukraine. There are 4,000-5,000 risky industrial plants and also a lot of coal mines. Contaminated water must be pumped out of them. When it is no longer done, the water may flood and end up in rivers, groundwater and possibly also drinking water, says Van der Vet.
According to him, such effects were clearly visible already at the beginning of the war, but little attention was paid to them.
– The consequences of the war of aggression started by Russia last year have been better highlighted, and they are of course also much wider.
There has been direct damage to natural resources and agriculture as well as factories, water treatment plants and nuclear power plants, and the effects on the environment have spread throughout the country, he sums up.
Freek Van der Vet’s research is primarily based on interviews with environmental safety experts who have worked in Donbass since 2014 and experts who have developed environmental protection policies, satellite images and other remote sensing. However, because of the war, many researchers have had to give up field work.
– From remote sensing, we get a comprehensive picture of what is really happening. In general, the data is also open, i.e. easily accessible to everyone, says Van der Vet.
However, satellite images do not show how the disaster affects health in the long term. If someone who drank contaminated groundwater gets cancer 40 years from now, it is difficult to prove that the cause was precisely the exposure caused by the war, Van der Vet clarifies.
A percentage or two more in the probability of cancer decades from now is not so visible that it would make big news.
However, the damages suffered by the environment and human health are intertwined and do not know national borders.
– Poison leaks from Ukraine can spread to the entire Black Sea region. They may affect Moldova, Russia and Eastern Europe. The war has already affected energy and food exports. The consequences are by no means limited to Ukraine, says Van der Vet.
All military activities and production have emissions, and they also affect climate change in the long term.
Freek Van der Vet
How long will it take for the silent victim of the war in Ukraine to begin to recover? Freek Van der Vet shakes his head.
– I can’t say that. I do not know. It takes a very long time, he replies.
The long-term effects can be seen in all wars, he says, taking the Vietnam War as an example. Because of the Agent Orange spread in the fields and forests by the US armed forces, children are still being born with serious injuries in Vietnam.
Agent Orange, which got its name from the orange color of its barrels, was a pesticide that was spread from airplanes between 1964 and 1971.
In the last years of the war, it was no longer used after the US Cancer Research Institute had shown its effects on humans.
By spraying Agent Orange, the United States tried to destroy the protection of the forests and the food provided by the fields from the soldiers of North Vietnam and the guerillas of South Vietnam.
The consequences have been seen in Vietnam as, among other things, cancers and various birth defects, such as the absence of eyes.
It was more than half a century since the injections, but the effects still continue, already in the third generation.
Also in the United States, Vietnam War veterans have had more cancer than average, and their children have also been affected by the fact that Agents Orange’s dioxin TCDD also causes mutations in germ cells.
American of the University of Illinois (you are moving to another service) a study some years ago mapped ten areas in Vietnam where soil TCDD levels are still dangerously high. All are former US air bases. Millions of people live in the villages and cities around them.
A US study concluded that the only way to clean up the soil and sediment in Vietnam’s most polluted areas is fire.
Is there any hope for nature in Ukraine to recover from the consequences of war in this century, if the scars of Vietnam are still so clear both in people and in the environment?
The destruction of war has a paradoxical flip side: when a large part of the country has to be rebuilt, it is possible to do it more environmentally friendly than before. ReStart Ukraine (you switch to another service) – project is already gathering information and skills for it.
In Ukraine, the idea of rebuilding the country in accordance with the principles of sustainable development is actively pursued, Freek Van der Vet also says.
– If it succeeds, then of course it will also be a decades-long effort, he says.
Government of Ukraine in the recovery plan (you move to another service) the pursuit of key social, economic and geopolitical goals is aligned in a green, sustainable and transparent way, and future hopes loom for a climate-neutral state in accordance with the European Green Development Program.