Russia’s War Could Cause Environmental Disasters In Ukraine

During a lull between air raid warnings earlier this month, Iryna Nikolaieva sat in a stairwell of a Kyiv bomb shelter where she had been living for three days and called engineers at two chemical plants near the front lines in the country’s east. Nikolaiva was an expert on hazardous waste. She worried that fighting near facilities could damage earthendams that held back hundreds of thousand of tons of chemical effluent, setting off a devastating accident.

One manager at the site said that everything was under control. The chief engineer of the other—a chemical processing facility with waste facilities less than two miles from the front line near the town of Toresk—said he had no idea how the storage sites were holding up. “They said they could not get there because of active hostilities,” says Nikolaieva, speaking from Warsaw, where she fled after nine days living in the bomb shelter with her son, his girlfriend, and hundreds of other Kyiv residents. “It’s not safe for people to go there to check.”

Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine has already caused unimaginable suffering, with millions of civilians forced to flee their homes, and thousands of others trapped under Russian shelling in cities like Mariupol. The fighting is also creating new environmental hazards, which threaten to add to the war’s human cost. Some of those environmental risks, like a release of radiation from one of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, could have immediate and devastating consequences. Others, such as carcinogenic dust from bombed buildings that can cause cancer, pose long-term threats with potential reverberations for many years or decades after the fighting ceases.

“Civilians depend on their immediate surroundings and the environment,” says Richard Pearshouse, the director of the environment and human rights division of Human Rights Watch. “It’s no longer sufficient to think of the environment as an afterthought to conflict.”

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All wars create devastating environmental threats for civilians, but the fighting in Ukraine could lead to particularly disastrous environmental consequences because the country is so heavily industrialized, particularly in the east, considered to be Ukraine’s industrial heartland. Much of that infrastructure—steel plants in the eastern Donets Basin, chemical facilities near cities like Kyiv and Korosten, and weapons factories, including facilities to produce intercontinental ballistic missiles—was developed in the Soviet era, with some having fallen into disrepair or mismanagement in recent years. These facilities also face increased risks from warfare. While some hazards may be manageable under normal circumstances, they can cause serious injury or death if they are damaged or bombed. Hydropower dams can fail and flood entire towns or villages. One of the most dangerous threats is the possibility of a toxic waste spill from one of Ukraine’s chemical facilities, such as the plant near Toresk.

The facility could be particularly vulnerable to damage, and an incident could have devastating consequences. The Toresk facility has two huge man-made toxic waste ponds, each emitting sickly-sweet phenol fumes, along with gaseous naphthalene and formaldehyde (even standing nearby is enough to cause nausea and dizziness, and to irritate visitors’ throats and eyes). Nikolaieva conducted a government-sponsored audit at the facility in 2019, and found that one of the dams holding back more than a quarter million tons of chemical sludge had “obvious” signs of instability.

She Conclusion that fighting with Russia-backed rebels risked setting off a chain reaction disaster—shelling could breach one of the storage ponds and send thousands of tons of waste racing downhill, flooding an even larger 8 million ton, man-made lake filled with chemical byproducts below. This surge could cause a tsunami of toxic sludge to flood the Zalizna river. It could also breach the levees at the site, causing millions of tons of toxic sludge to flow into the river. The chemical ooze will knock out bridges and electrocutors downstream and contaminate the drinking water supply for the entire region. “People will die if it’s the only water that they can drink,” Nikolaieva says. “Maybe for one week [they will be] okay, and then your organs will be poisoned; the liver first.”

Notably, a lot of that poison would flow downstream to the Seversky Donnets river and into Russia. “I would like to inform Russians and say we will have our chemicals in the water taps,” Nikolaieva says.

The effects of the war in Ukraine on local environments and health will be less apparent. Even if fighting does not take place near industrial facilities, it can still cause new hazards. For example, groundwater contamination from fuel spilled or heavy metals and chemicals left behind by spent arms. Many of the effects of environmental damage may only become apparent in the years after fighting ends—like carcinogenic dust and debris that could cause cancers (like those affecting 9/11 first responders) in survivors of shelling attacks. If a major disaster occurs, war will only make matters worse by not allowing adequate warnings and containment efforts to be made.

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The nuclear facilities are a prime example. This is especially true after Russian forces attacked and fought over the Chernobyl exclusion zones irradiated Chernobyl early in fighting. Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in the county’s southeast earlier this month, sparking a fire at the facility. According to Olena Pareniuk, Kateryna Shavanova and Kateryna Shavanova (two Ukrainian radiobiologists who have extensive experience working at Chernobyl), a major accident at either site could have huge repercussions on Ukraine, the wider region, or even the entire hemisphere. Pareniuk is in Kyiv, while Shavanova is near Chernivtsi in Ukraine. If the massive arc-shaped steel shelter built to confine the remains of Chernobyl’s No. It could spread radioactive dust throughout the region if the No. 4 reactor is damaged. And an accident at Zaporizhzhia, which houses an amount of nuclear material equivalent to 20 Chernobyls, could be even more disastrous than the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, since the ongoing war could make it all but impossible to mount an effective cleanup response (it took about 500,000 “liquidators” recruited from around the USSR to contain the Chernobyl disaster).

“No one with common sense would enter the territory of a nuclear plant with artillery weapons,” Pareniuk and Shavanova write over email. “For us…such behavior does not even fit into our understanding of the world. It’s as if the river flowed up in the sky by itself or the sky turned orange.”

Ukraine’s environmental protection ministry has made attempts to catalog the environmental damage caused by Russian attacks. Some NGOs have also worked remotely to try and map potential environmental hazardsYou can help with cleanup efforts after the war is over, as well as to warn civilians.

For now, in the midst of the fighting, it’s hard to see the real extent of environmental contamination—though numerous reports of bombed industrial plants aren’t a good sign. “We don’t even know what number of square kilometers [of land] have been destroyed,” says Tetiana Omelianenko, a waste management consultant based in Kyiv. Online pages have been created by Ukrainian environmental experts. These pages allow residents and businesses to report any environmental incidents that occurred during the conflict, such as spilled gasoline from fuel storage facilities or the destruction of an industry plant. “After the end of the war, it will be evaluated and published,” Omelianenko says. “Only after that can we do some estimations [of environmental damage].”

But until fighting stops, Ukraine’s environmental experts can only do so much. Since getting to Poland, Nikolaieva has worked for the Ukrainian government without pay, preparing information on Ukraine’s toxic waste sites to present to intergovernmental groups. Omelianenko, who has remained in Kyiv despite ongoing attacks, has divided her time between volunteering and continuing her environmental consulting work (“More or less, I have a strong nervous system,” she says). She is surveying Ukrainian waste management companies to try and predict what will happen if the fighting shuts down their operations, and she’s planning to help revise a green action plan for the city of Kyiv after the fighting ends, changing cost estimates to account for damage from Russian artillery, with the idea of keeping the city on track for its climate goals. She’s also sprouting plant seeds in her apartment—another effort to prepare for a future without bombs and shelling.

“When the war ends,” Omelianenko says, “I’ll need to grow flowers in my garden.”

Write to Alejandro de la Garza at [email protected].