Ukraine Wants Russia to Pay for the War's Environmental Impact

Reports of a terrible odor and polluted water near the city of Brovary, 12 miles northeast of Kyiv, started making their way to Ukrainian environmental regulators this summer. Olena Sydorenko, an official at a regional environmental agency, was sent to investigate. Back in early March, Russian rockets had destroyed a large, frozen-food warehouse as the invasion force moved in to occupy the area. As huge quantities of butter, meat, and vegetables began to spoil, local residents did their best to deal with the waste, burying the food in dozens of nearly 600 ft.-long trenches in a nearby field.

Sydorenko arrived three months later, after Ukrainian forces recaptured the region. She conducted tests of the local groundwater, and found that the rotten food had been leaching nitrates and ammonia into the groundwater, poisoning local wells. The smell, she says, was indescribable.

“You can imagine how horrible the odor was if you, for example, forgot some food in your kitchen and came back after a while,” she says. “The odor at the site was much worse.”

Ukraine has endured almost unfathomable damage during the war with Russia. More than 6,000 civilians have been killed, while thousands of homes and apartment blocks have been shelled, and billions of dollars worth of infrastructure has been turned into charred and mangled wrecks. The environment has also been a casualty of the war, in ways that have affected both human health and local ecosystems. Massive forest fires spread as the fighting raged, while attacks on fuel and industrial facilities caused chemicals to leach into rivers and groundwater. “Before the war, we never found such high levels of oil products in the soil and water,” Sydorenko says. “We have never seen such pollution.”

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