An environmental historian reflects on the far-reaching consequences of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine

By the time the television crew arrived, there wasn’t much to film but ash. Apparently, the broken bits of drone had pulverized on impact, setting fire to the surrounding brush. The headlines were arresting—“Russian drone debris crosses Romanian border”—but the cameras had to make do with a black, smoldering smear in the dirt.

I watched the broadcast with interest from a Bucharest café during the summer of 2024. A few days earlier, I had been exploring the Danube River, about ten miles from the spot where the drone crashed.

Three days and ten miles isn’t a near miss. But it was close enough to get my attention.

No conflict is truly contained. Yet from the beginning, Russia’s war on Ukraine has been remarkable for its global repercussions: Millions displaced. Soaring food and energy prices. Sabotaged infrastructure. Massive arms and aid transfers.

And occasionally, an errant drone careens across international borders

The downed drone brought to mind friends and colleagues in Ukraine—people living under actual bombardment. But the charred ground it left behind also reminded me, an environmental historian, of the conflict’s ecological spillovers. That black stain near the Danube’s bank is just one speck in a landscape that is being beaten, poisoned, and torn every day.

I was in Romania and Bulgaria this past summer to conduct research. I spent weekdays in Bucharest and Constanța, digging through archival files on topics such as the Chornobyl disaster, sturgeon fishing, and the Danube-Black Sea canal. And on the weekends, I drove out to places like the Danube Delta, a biodiversity hotspot.

As a postdoctoral scholar at the Harriman Institute, I’m writing a history of the Black Sea region from 1930 to the present. Specifically, I’m investigating how environmental issues, like fishing and water pollution, have shaped the Black Sea’s political relationships. I want to know how the region’s states cooperated—or competed—in the management of transborder ecological concerns.

One of my project’s core arguments is that modern geopolitical orders—the alliances, rivalries, and power balances that structure interstate relations in a particular period—also function as environmental orders. The Cold War, for instance, contoured the circulation of scientific research, regulatory regimes, pollution, and flora and fauna around the Black Sea in ways that distinguished it from previous eras. Likewise, the Cold War’s end ushered in a new system of environmental management characterized by multilateral institutions.

Today, we’re living through another big geopolitical/ecological shift. The war in Ukraine—and whatever comes next—will leave a tangible legacy for the Black Sea and its hinterlands. It’s impossible to predict with certainty what these long-term outcomes might be. For one, events are volatile and unfolding. For another, much of the information we have is produced by groups that have a clear stake in the struggle to control the war’s narrative.

We can, however, identify several important (if largely dispiriting) trends.

For starters, wars are bad for the environment—a truism that deepens, rather than diminishes, the acute human suffering they inflict. Broadly, this plays out in four ways, each of which has defined the Black Sea’s latest conflict.

Visitors to the Danube Delta Eco-Tourism Museum Center in Tulcea, Romania, above an aquarium that showcases endangered sturgeon species. This and the following photograph were taken by the author during his summer 2024 research trip.

First, militaries have ravenous metabolisms. Even in peacetime, armies consume vast quantities of resources—everything from food, to fuel, to building materials.

Like all enterprises, they also produce waste. A 2022 report by the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a watchdog organization accredited by the UN, estimates that the world’s militaries are responsible for about 5.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, the primacy of national defense in political agendas means that armed forces are often exempt from domestic environmental regulations—not to mention international agreements such as the 2015 Paris Climate Accords.

The forces arrayed in Eastern Europe and their allies are no exception. The Ukrainian environmental ministry postulates that the mobilization, fighting, and reconstruction will pump some 175 million tons of extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—equal to the annual emissions of the Netherlands, Europe’s sixth largest economy.

Second, modern weaponry tends to poison land, air, and water—with lingering health effects for the communities that rely on them. Some World War I battlefields are still contaminated by heavy metals; shipwrecks from World War II continue to ooze chemicals.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Putin regime’s pretensions to Eastern Ukraine are wrecking it—and not only on the frontline. Only a year into the full-scale war, a report in Science claimed that the fighting had sparked 20,000 fires across Ukraine, scorching more than 750,000 hectares—an area larger than Delaware. The explosive ordnances lobbed by both sides are leaching pollutants. So too are damaged infrastructures: methane from pipelines, ammonia from chemical factories, oil from port facilities, and on and on. It’s a gruesome list, whose legacy will range from habitat loss to birth defects (even barring a catastrophe at one of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants).

Mines might be the deadliest residue. According to the Polish Centre for Eastern Studies, nearly a third of Ukrainian land is pocked by the weapons—at an estimated cleanup cost of $38 billion. Neither is the Black Sea safe; unmoored naval mines have turned up perilously close to shorelines and shipping lanes, including the heavily trafficked Bosporus Strait. Russian territory, too, is mined.

Local wildlife may already be feeling the squeeze. The Ukrainian environmental ministry announced that a fifth or more of the country’s nature preserves have been degraded. Most notoriously, as the Ukrainian and Russian navies stalked the Black Sea in spring 2022, unusual numbers of dolphin and porpoise carcasses washed up on beaches. With 2,500 dead seals surfacing soon after on the Caspian Sea—a launchpad for Russian vehicles and missiles—it’s reasonable to suspect that the war is pushing vulnerable animals over the edge.

Third, since antiquity clashing armies have targeted the environment intentionally. They do so to burn, starve, poison, expose, deter, or displace the enemy. Rome legendarily (and probably apocryphally) salted Carthaginian fields. Imperial Russia torched Caucasian forests. The United States sprayed the herbicide Agent Orange on North Vietnamese redoubts.

We’ve seen similar tactics in today’s war—from the small-scale (Ukrainian soldiers flooded farmland to slow the invasion) to the large-scale (Russian soldiers likely blew up the Nova Kakhovka Dam). The dam’s demise sent 18 cubic kilometers of reservoir water down the Dnipro River, robbing a million Ukrainians of drinking water and overwhelming wetlands, according to a January 2024 report in Science. By targeting civilian infrastructure, Russia’s leadership hopes to render parts of Ukraine unlivable. Such practices have come to be known as “ecocide,” a nod to the better-known “genocide” (some definitions of the term also include unintentional environmental harms). The Ukrainian government has joined some countries and international activist organizations in calling for the International Criminal Court to codify ecocide as a prosecutable crime under international law.

Fourth, war complicates efforts to solve transborder environmental problems. This point often goes unmentioned in analyses of this war’s ecological dimensions. It’s insensitive—perhaps even condemnable—to invoke seeming luxuries like scientific diplomacy, information sharing, and stewardship while people are dying in frightful confrontation. Who cares about trees or seals or climate futures when the human plight is so immediate? The argument therefore bears repeating: nature’s disfigurement, tragic in its own right, will compound communal traumas in the short and long terms.

It’s appropriate, then, to lament the disruption to environmental cooperation in the Black Sea region and beyond. The Black Sea littoral has rarely been a propitious setting for would-be peacemakers. From Rome and the Pontic Kingdom to the Ottoman and Russian Empires, the sea’s residents have regularly succumbed to rivalry. The Cold War, too, militated against dialogue (though, as my research shows, some eco-friendly initiatives did slip through the Iron Curtain). Communism’s demise shattered this status quo, and the 1990s seemed like the dawn of a multilateral golden age. With international backing, the region’s newly independent states launched a raft of joint endeavors on pollution abatement, scientific exchange, and environmental protection. But the twenty-first century has not been kind to the optimists: territorial revisionism in the South Caucasus, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine have pummeled the Black Sea’s cooperative institutions into oblivion or obsolescence.

This regional decoupling echoes globally. Russia is the planet’s largest country, in area. It has the fourth-longest coastline, fourth-highest level of greenhouse gas emissions, and the second- or third- highest incidence of methane mega-leaks. It also sits atop millions of acres of thawing permafrost. Moscow’s readiness to court pariah status has led to the withdrawal—or expulsion—of Russian expertise, data, and funding from global and regional environmental initiatives. This blows a Russia-sized hole in research agendas—one that won’t be easily mended.

A couple relaxes in Sulina, Romania, where the Danube River’s main shipping canal reaches the Black Sea.

To be sure, there are countertrends to war’s grim environmental record. Human conflict can also open curious windows for ecological recovery. Scholars have noted the rewilding of depopulated areas like the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone and the Korean DMZ. In the same way that Covid lockdowns reduced automobile emissions, observers have suggested that the closure of Ukrainian factories and Black Sea fishing grounds could improve air quality and fish stocks. But this path to a greener future should cheer no one but the most committed misanthropist.

If there’s reason for hope, it’s obviously to be found in reconstruction, not destruction. When I began my research as a graduate student in 2017, the Cold War seemed like a low point for the Black Sea’s ecosystems. The last two years of relentless conflict have shown that the region can sink further. When the war ends—when the drones stop plummeting from the sky—it will be time to build more just systems, in environmental management as well as geopolitics. The two are bound together. ◆

Featured photo (at the top): Water flows over the collapsed Kakhovka Dam in Nova Kakhovka, in Russian-occupied Ukraine, June 7, 2023. Destruction of the dam, likely carried out by Russian soldiers, robbed a million Ukrainians of drinking water and overwhelmed wetlands along the Dnipro River. Photograph via AP

Taylor Zajicek is Mellon Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in History at the Harriman Institute.