Written by Max Hander
Sviaty Sacred Park, Ukraine (Reuters) – Serhiy Tsapok surveyed the smoldering ruins and blackened stumps of pine trees as far as the eye could see, the hallmarks of a scorched nation.
“It’s already dead,” the exhausted ranger said of the trees he had been growing for nearly 20 years. The 41-year-old’s daily trek through the Ukrainian forest was once fun, but now it’s a nightmare.
“Now I prefer to look at the road when I drive.”
The fire he extinguished was caused by an unknown explosion and wiped out three hectares of 80-year-old pine trees in eastern Ukraine’s Sviaty-Holy National Park, local officials said. Four-fifths of the park’s approximately 12,000 hectares have been damaged or destroyed by fire or weapons.
This is just one drop in the ocean of damage caused by a war that has brutally destroyed much of Ukraine’s landscape and 10 million hectares (100,000 square kilometers) of forest. Russian and Ukrainian armies fire thousands of shells at each other every day, tearing the globe apart in fierce battles reminiscent of the trench warfare of World War I.
Conflict also brought innovations in destruction.
Two videos posted in September by units of Ukraine’s 108th Territorial Defense Brigade show small drones spraying red-hot glowing substances into long trees, setting them on fire and attempting to wipe out Russian troops. was being shown.
Reuters spoke to nearly 20 experts in the field, including forest rangers, ecologists, demining experts and government officials, to provide a detailed picture of the ruins left in Ukraine’s forests by 31 months of war. revealed.
Russian authorities did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Serhiy Primachuk, director of Svyati-Khori National Park, told Reuters that large swaths of the region, once a rare, beloved and beautiful place in a highly industrialized region, were destroyed by Russian munitions. He said it was burnt down.
“Our loss is huge,” he said.
Forestry is now a dangerous occupation, with mines and unexploded ordnance hidden underground posing the greatest threat.
Oleksandr Polovinko, a 39-year-old ranger, almost lost his leg last year when he stepped on a landmine while tending the forest. “I crawled back to my car and drove home on one leg,” he recalled. It took six months before he returned to work.
All that remains of many forests in eastern Ukraine are fields of torn and broken trunks. Experts said local wildlife such as deer, wild boar and woodpeckers have been severely affected by habitat loss, but it is currently difficult to assess biodiversity loss in forests.
The Chernobyl Nature Reserve in northern Ukraine is home to more than 100 pre-war Przewalski horses, a globally endangered wild animal, according to ecologist Ole Listpad of the ANTS advocacy group. Horses) have been hit hard by the conflict. It becomes difficult to extinguish the fire.
“At this point, it’s questionable how long this species can continue to be there,” Listpad said.
jungle is destroyed
Environmental protection is not a top priority for countries fighting to repel invading forces in conflicts that have claimed tens of thousands of lives.
Nevertheless, the damage to forests is part of the war’s broader environmental destruction, polluting land and rivers, polluting the air, and leaving vast areas of the country riddled with mines and left desolate for decades to come. There is a possibility of leaving behind a natural heritage. , according to experts.
The conflict is exacerbating the destruction of Ukraine’s forests due to long-standing factors such as illegal logging. Damage during war is caused by various factors. Air strikes can cause large-scale fires, and some forests near the front line have been subjected to intensive shelling, turning them into fields of stumps.
Brian Milakovsky, a U.S.-based forester who most recently lived and worked in Ukraine for eight years, said the dense pine forests common to eastern Ukraine are easily scorched by fire and destroyed by the conflict.
Ecologists and park officials say the war destroyed the habitat of several unique plants, including chalk pine, a rare subspecies of red pine.
Milakovsky said the environmental crisis was particularly acute in Russia’s occupied territories (almost a fifth of Ukraine), where occupation authorities appeared to have little ability to extinguish forest fires. He estimated that about 80% of the pine forests in the eastern Luhansk region had been destroyed.
booby traps and trip wires
According to the Ministry of the Environment, about 425,000 hectares of forests across the country have been found to be contaminated with landmines and unexploded ordnance, an area half the size of Cyprus.
Officials say they still need to inspect up to 3 million hectares of forest occupied or occupied by Russian forces and likely to contain landmines and weapons. According to forest officials interviewed, the Russian troops retreated, leaving booby traps and tripwires behind after heavy digging.
“Even if we wanted to extinguish the fires quickly, it would be impossible, because the entire territory is mined,” Ruslan Strylets, Ukraine’s environment minister at the time, said in an interview in July. “There is a risk of death or serious injury.”
In fact, according to data from the Ministry of the Environment, in addition to seriously injuring rangers like Polovinko, 14 forest workers were killed by landmines, booby traps and artillery fire during the conflict.
On two separate occasions in Donetsk, Reuters reporters witnessed rangers and firefighters watching from narrow clear roads as fires tore through the undergrowth of mined forests right in front of them.
Over the summer, Reuters witnessed deminers from the National Emergency Service of Ukraine methodically clearing dirt roads in the forest area of Sviaty Holly. Team leader Mikita Novikov, 24, said the team had cleared a strip 200 meters long and eight meters wide over the past two days, but on the most difficult days they might only be able to advance five meters.
“There were days we destroyed 50 items,” he added.
Three demining experts told Reuters that working in forests is much more difficult than clearing fields because most demining machines cannot move around trees.
“Inches and inches have to be cleared by hand,” said Adam Komorowski, regional director of the NGO Mine Action Group.
Decades, billions of dollars
Experts interviewed said it would take decades and cost billions of dollars to repair the damage to forests. Questions whether some heavily mined areas will be cleared, citing past examples of forests being declared no-go areas after previous European wars. There were also people.
Strylets, who has since become environment minister, said it would take “many years” after the war just to understand the damage to forests.
He told Reuters in Kiev on July 22 that the current official estimate is that it will take 70 years to clear all contaminated areas, including forests and other areas such as farmland.
Four ecologists with expertise in Ukrainian forests said the subsequent regeneration process of the affected areas could be complex and take decades, requiring billions of dollars in additional investments.
According to a June 2024 study on carbon emissions from the war in Ukraine, conflict-related forest fires directly emit greenhouse gases equivalent to 6.75 million tons of CO2, equivalent to Armenia’s annual emissions. Ukraine also loses the carbon capture potential of these burnt trees.
In February, the World Bank estimated that the war had caused more than $30 billion in damage to protected natural areas such as forests and wetlands.
This includes $3.3 billion in direct damage from the fighting, $26.5 billion worth of broader economic and environmental costs, including pollution, and $2.6 billion in repair costs.
Ukraine’s position is that Russia should compensate for the damage caused. Maksym Popov, an environmental adviser to Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, told Reuters that Kiev is pursuing about 40 criminal cases against Russia over deforestation.