Ukraine’s vast forests have been ravaged in a landscape of war hell By Reuters

By Max Hunder

SVIATI HORY NATIONAL PARK, Ukraine (Reuters) – Serhiy Tsapok surveyed the smoldering ruins of pine trees, blackened stumps as far as the eye can see that testify to a scorched nation.

“They’re dead now,” the weary ranger said of the trees he’s tended for nearly two decades. The 41-year-old’s daily trek through the Ukrainian forests, once a joy, has become a nightmare.

“Now when I’m driving, it’s better to just look at the road.”

The fire he fought, caused by an explosion of undetermined cause, destroyed three hectares of octogenarian pines in Sviati Hory National Park in eastern Ukraine, according to officials there. Four-fifths of the park’s nearly 12,000 hectares have been damaged or destroyed by fire or munitions, they said.

It’s a drop in the ocean of damage from the war, which has brutalized Ukraine’s landscape and much of its 10 million hectares, or 100,000 square km, of forest. Both the Russian and Ukrainian armies blast thousands of shells at each other every day, shattering the ground in a crushing battle that echoes the trench warfare of World War I.

The conflict also innovated in destruction.

Two videos posted in September by a unit of Ukraine’s 108th Territorial Defense Brigade showed a small drone trying to drive away Russian troops by spraying a glowing, hot substance on a long line of trees and setting them on fire.

Reuters spoke to nearly 20 experts in the field, including foresters, ecologists, demining experts and government officials, who provided a detailed picture of the devastation wrought on Ukraine’s forests by the 31-month war.

Russian authorities did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

The director of Sviati Hory National Park, Serhiy Pryimachuk, told Reuters that Russian munitions had burned vast areas of the area, once a rare and cherished beauty spot in a heavily industrialized region.

“What we’ve lost is enormous,” he said.

Forestry is now a dangerous occupation, with mines and unexploded ordnance hidden in the ground posing the greatest threat.

Oleksandr Polovynko, a 39-year-old ranger, nearly lost a leg after stepping on a mine while tending the forest last year. “I crawled back to the car and drove home on one leg,” he recalled. It took him six months to return to work.

Of many forests in eastern Ukraine, only fields of stripped and broken logs remain. Local wildlife, including deer, wild boar and woodpeckers, have been badly affected by habitat loss, experts said, although it is currently difficult to assess the loss of biodiversity in the forests.

In the Chornobyl nature reserve in northern Ukraine, the pre-war population of more than 100 Przewalski’s horses – a globally endangered wild horse species – has been hit hard by the conflict, according to Oleh Lystopad, an ecologist with the group advocacy ANTS, which said the mines are making it difficult to put out fires.

“At this point, the question is to what extent this species can continue to exist there,” Lystopad said.

DECIMATED DENSE FORESTS

Protecting the environment is not the highest priority for a country struggling to repel an invading army in a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The damage to the forests is, however, part of a wider trail of environmental destruction caused by the war, which could leave a grim natural legacy for decades to come, having poisoned the land and rivers, polluted the air and left vast areas of the country pierced by me. , according to experts.

The conflict has exacerbated the destruction of Ukraine’s forests by long-standing factors such as illegal logging. Damage during the war was caused by various factors: aerial bombardment can start large fires, while some forests near the front are bombed so intensively that they become a field of stumps.

Dense Scots pine forests in eastern Ukraine catch light easily and have been decimated by the conflict, said Brian Milakovsky, a US forester who until recently lived and worked in Ukraine for eight years.

The war has torn apart the habitats of unique flora, such as the chalk pine, a rare subspecies of Scots pine, according to ecologists and park officials.

Milakovsky said the environmental crisis was particularly acute in Russian-held areas – nearly a fifth of Ukraine – where occupation authorities appear to have little ability to put out forest fires. He estimated that about 80 percent of the pine forests in the eastern Luhansk region were destroyed.

TRAPS AND TRIPWIRES

About 425,000 hectares of forest across the country were found to be contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance, an area half the size of Cyprus, according to the Environment Ministry.

Authorities say they still need to inspect up to 3 million hectares of forest that are or have been occupied by Russian forces and are likely filled with mines and ammunition. Foresters interviewed said the Russians were heavily dug in and left traps and transition wires behind as they retreated.

“If we want to put out a fire quickly, it’s impossible because the entire territory is mined,” Ruslan Strilet, who was Ukraine’s environment minister at the time of his July interview. “There is a risk of being killed or maimed.”

Indeed, in addition to the serious injuries suffered by guards like Polovynko, 14 forest workers were killed by mines, traps and bombings during the conflict, according to data from the Ministry of the Environment.

On two separate occasions in Donetsk, Reuters reporters saw rangers and fire crews watching from narrow cleared paths as fires tore through the mined forest in front of them.

Reuters followed deminers from the State Emergency Service of Ukraine methodically sweeping a dirt road through the forest in Sviati Hory during the summer. Mykyta Novikov, the 24-year-old team leader, said the team had cleared a strip 200 meters long and eight wide in the past two days, but on the most difficult days they could advance only 5 meters.

“We’ve had days where we destroy 50 items,” he added.

Three demining experts told Reuters that operating in forests is much more difficult than clearing open fields because most demining machines cannot navigate around trees.

“It takes manual clearance inch by inch,” said Adam Komorowski, regional director at the NGO Mines Action Group.

DECADES AND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS

Experts interviewed said that the process of repairing the damage to the forests will take decades and cost billions of dollars. Some doubted that some heavily mined forest areas would ever be cleared, citing past examples of forests declared no-go areas after previous European wars.

The country will need “many, many years” after the war to assess just the damage to its forests, said Strilets, who has since been replaced as environment minister.

The current official estimate is that demining the entire contaminated territory, including forests and other areas such as farmland, would take 70 years, he told Reuters in Kyiv on July 22.

Four ecologists with experience in Ukrainian forests said the subsequent process of regenerating the affected areas would be complex and could take decades, plus billions of dollars in investment.

According to a June 2024 study on the carbon emissions of the war in Ukraine, conflict-related forest fires directly emitted greenhouse gases equivalent to 6.75 million tons of CO2, the equivalent of Armenia’s annual emissions. Ukraine also lost the carbon sequestration potential of those burned trees.

The World Bank estimated in February that war damage to forests and other protected natural areas, including swamps and wetlands, exceeded $30 billion.

These included $3.3 billion in direct battle damage, higher economic and environmental costs, including $26.5 billion in pollution, and a $2.6 billion reparations bill.

Ukraine’s position is that Russia should pay for the damage it has caused. Maksym Popov, an environmental adviser to Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, told Reuters that Kiev was pursuing about 40 criminal cases against Russia for forest destruction.