In the years before the full-scale war, I used to be an avid recycler. My balcony was half-filled with 120-liter black plastic bags filled to the brim with assorted plastic waste, carefully washed and dried. Plastic bags within plastic bags, yogurt cartons, cheese packaging, soft drink bottles, plastic containers - I took care to properly clean them, squish them, and store them so that one day I would take them to No Waste Ukraine. The service had cost quite a bit, about 300 Ukrainian Hryvnias per 120-liter bag, a fee I paid so that No Waste Ukraine would recycle the plastic *properly*. Otherwise, the municipal services would take the to-be-recycled plastic and, with all likelihood, simply burn it, or worse still, just toss it into a landfill. The organization made sure - and still does, even during the great war - that we Ukrainians reduce our plastic trace on the planet.
Back in those days, I was a climate optimist. I had hoped that by reducing my small share of waste I could join with others who did the same, that individual behavior change could accumulate into a meaningful reduction of pollution. It seemed possible that a movement to reduce plastic and change approaches to both producing packaging and its re-use or recycling could also push big corporations and big companies to heed the needs of their customers, keen on being conscientious about the planet. Sure, some of it seemed like swimming upstream, as it was simply cheaper for corporations to keep using plastic, to keep going as they were.
Born and raised amid the majestic Ukrainian northwestern woods, I saw the change happening with my own eyes. With each passing year, I saw the trees get visibly sick, the swamps I used to tread through turned into solid ground. The well beside my mother’s house didn’t meet her needs, so I spent a small fortune supporting my family’s project to drill deep to reach a bigger underground water source. In Kyiv, where I lived and worked, the Dnipro river reliably got covered with a thin green film of algae, proliferating freely in still and shallow water.
Then the full-scale war began, and the small individual efforts to stall the avalanche of climate change met an overwhelming wave of localized climate destruction and pollution. Russia has been waging war against the Ukrainian people, but also against the Ukrainian house animals, wild animals, the wilderness, against our bountiful land and nature. Immediately in the first months of the land incursion into Ukraine, about 20 percent of our land became filled with landmines - metal, plastic, explosives - that would take years, decades, to remove. Anti-personnel mines, the majority of the count, typically weigh up to 0.5 kilo each. Anti-tank mines weigh up to 10 kilos each. Assume there’s no less than a million mines total, with a mix of landmines of all sizes and purposes. These tons and tons of metal and plastic, scattered around the land, versus my lightweight black trash bags filled with squashed plastic.
The russian war against Ukraine makes all my recycling efforts seem meaningless, like a drop in the ocean, and here’s only part of the reason why. Russia launched at least 50,000 Shahed drones against Ukraine, and at least 20,000 ballistic and cruise missiles. Total war-related emissions are estimated at 230 million tonnes of CO₂. A single missile explosion generates about 60 kg of emissions. Around three million hectares of Ukrainian forest have been destroyed or damaged, cutting the country’s greenhouse gas absorption capacity by 1.7 million tonnes annually. The Kakhovka Dam breach by the russians on 6 June 2023 alone is deemed an ecocide, as the sudden, uncontrolled release of water flooded extensive areas along the Dnipro, causing bank erosion and destroying floodplain forests, swamps, and meadows that served as habitat for numerous species. Millions of fish, molluscs, and other aquatic organisms perished because they couldn’t adapt to the sudden drainage of the reservoir. Ukraine’s own efforts to ward off russia, our Defense Forces’ deep strikes into russia are hitting oil refineries, causing air pollution, large-scale fires, and contaminated soil. Necessary for affecting the enemy and curbing its war economy, these strikes add up to the total toll of the full-scale war.
This is why the russian war against Ukraine is a climate war. Russians initiated, and keep perpetuating, war against the climate, and a climate war over the resources that will be deemed scarce in the near future - fertile land, water, and critical minerals.
Beneath the genocidal, cultural, military, and diplomatic narrative of the russian war against Ukraine, there is also the issue of control over Ukraine’s vast natural resources. Ukraine’s estimated 20,000 mineral deposits, including major reserves of coal, gas, iron, titanium, uranium, lithium, and rare earths concentrated largely in the Donbas and Black Sea shelf, made resource-rich regions like Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia prime targets for russia. The russian control over strategic minerals is surely one of the aims of its war: to capitalize on these precious or finite resources in a world that hasn’t yet transitioned away from fossil fuel dependence, and a world that requires rare elements to keep making sophisticated electronics and sustain the expansion of artificial intelligence.
Another climate-related aim of the russian war is the usurpation of fertile lands and the seizure of Ukrainian grain. Currently, russia blocks Ukrainian grain and food exports to the rest of the world, waging hunger as a war instrument, but also suggesting that it’s eyeing the Ukrainian fertile lands for itself. We are - or rather, used to be - one of the top agricultural exporters in the world, with 17 million hectares, a combined area of Austria and Chechia, sowed with grain and vegetables. Russia also stole grain from the occupied territories, which it is laundering through occupied Ukrainian ports, and selling onward to Egypt, Bangladesh, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, even Israel, marked as russian grain. Ukrainian intelligence estimates russia has pocketed over a billion dollars from roughly 15 million tonnes of stolen grain since the invasion began. This is an assault on global food security, an assault on Ukraine’s food security, and, underneath it all, an attempt to monetize hunger in a warming world.
My argument is: the russian war against Ukraine impacts you, too. Yes, you, far beyond our borders. Each explosion carries millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, our shared atmosphere that doesn’t recognize borders. The loss of biodiversity in Ukraine has consequences for the world. The loss of grain in Ukraine and our blocked export routes lead to more hunger. In a resource-anxious world, russia is usurping and occupying our rare minerals and land to profit off them, to sell our own resources as theirs, for a high price.
Do you think the raging wildfires in France, Spain, Canada, and the U.S. are all unrelated to this? Do you think the record-low levels of water in the Danube and Rhine, and other European rivers, are unrelated? Global warming keeps increasing with each bomb dropped by russia, with the fires and the emissions and the wreckage of wildlife habitats. Global warming then turns entire countries and our precious woods, oxygen-generating woods, into a tinderbox.
Diligently recycling plastic in your corner of the world may not have the effect on climate you expect, but supporting Ukraine might. Every hectare of our land demined is a hectare that stops leaching heavy metals into soil and groundwater. Every kilometer of coastline Ukraine holds is a kilometer of the Black Sea not slicked with refinery oil. Every tonne of grain that reaches other countries through a functioning, unblockaded port is an investment in global food security. And I know - supporting Ukraine’s efforts to hit russian oil refineries means more emissions in the short run - but in the long run, it’s the way towards stopping the russian war machine. Ukraine’s advantage on the battlefield and through deep-strikes is about reversing the damage done to our country, to our land, by russia.
Around European rivers, the so-called ‘hunger stones’ are showing up when the water levels drop - stones with inscriptions from a hundred year ago or more, containing etched warnings of drought and hardship. The most well-known stone in Děčín, Czechia, features the German phrase: “Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine” meaning, “If you see me, weep.” Meaning that if the water levels drop so low as to see the inscription on the stone, await trouble. For centuries, only the people of that exact riverbank saw the stone. Now a photograph travels the width of a continent in seconds, and the warning belongs to everyone who scrolls past it. Drought doesn’t stop at a border. Neither does war.
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