Greenpeace International has just published an exhaustive report on Russia’s environmental predicament. Entitled “Fossil-Fuel Empire: The Environment of Post-2022 Russia and the Kremlin’s Threat to Domestic and Global Stability and Sustainability,” the 9-chapter, 134-page report is “based on hundreds of studies and publications produced by various organisations, media outlets, expert communities and independent specialists working on Russian issues both within the country and abroad. More than 20 experts specialising in environmental preservation and activism contributed to its preparation.”
While it doesn’t cover the environmental costs of the Russo-Ukrainian war — a separate topic, for which it directs us to the websites of Greenpeace Ukraine and the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group — its attention to Russia is much needed.
That attention is both critical and constructive. It highlights the “extractivism” that the Putin administration has made into “the foundation of a system based on corruption, imperialist propaganda and repression” (p. 6) and the role of the vast Russian territory in global ecology: “the country,” according to the report’s Introduction, “is crucial to global environmental sustainability. Its vast boreal forest, permafrost and wetlands play a vital role in global climate stabilisation, while the diversity of its ecosystems – from Arctic deserts to the subtropical foothills of the Western Caucasus mountains – makes Russia a repository of unique biological riches” (p. 6). But it also seeks to provide an “alternative path” towards a sustainable, post-extractivist future.
Here are a few excerpts from the report’s conclusions:
Modern Russia’s politico-economic model is a system based on extractivism, authoritarianism and war, in which all the interconnected elements reinforce one another.
Natural resources are exploited intensively, but the proceeds from their use and sale are distributed unfairly: rather than being invested in social development and improving the population’s quality of life, these funds go primarily to enriching the elite, financing the military-industrial complex and maintaining the repressive apparatus.
War serves as a tool for concentrating power, a justification for repressive legislation and a pretext for the violent suppression of civil society.
Authoritarianism, in turn, supports the extractivist model, protecting the interests of elites, whose wealth and power depends on the exploitation of natural resources. Public participation in decision-making is limited, hindering necessary structural reforms. Issues of environmental and social justice are systematically excluded from state policy priorities.
This troika forms a vicious cycle of degradation: it destroys institutions, undermines legal and environmental norms, depletes nature, deprives people of the means to defend their interests and makes a transition to just, sustainable and peaceful development impossible. As a result, the victims of the system are both people, particularly the most vulnerable, and the environment upon which their safety and wellbeing depends.
The model constructed by the Putin regime threatens not only the future of Russia itself, but also global stability – the Kremlin wages war and stokes other military conflicts, destroys global institutions, accelerates the climate crisis and contributes to the loss of biodiversity. (p. 94)
With enormous resources, Russia, the report concludes, has “a unique potential for sustainable development.” But
in order for [those resources] to serve the wellbeing of people and the world, a fundamental transformation of the country’s development model is necessary. This includes an end to aggression against Ukraine and other countries, a rejection of neocolonialism, promoting international environmental and humanitarian cooperation, dismantling authoritarianism, the restoration of civil society, and a transition away from extractivism and toward sustainable development. (p. 103)
The entire report can be read here.
From Fossil-Fuel Empire: The Environment of Post-2022 Russia and the Kremlin’s Threat to Domestic and Global Stability and Sustainability, Greenpeace International, October, 2025, p. 95