{"id":14482,"date":"2026-04-24T15:01:29","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T20:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=14482"},"modified":"2026-04-24T15:01:31","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T20:01:31","slug":"how-war-is-environmental-the-ukrainian-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2026\/04\/24\/how-war-is-environmental-the-ukrainian-case\/","title":{"rendered":"How war is environmental: the Ukrainian case"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is cross-posted from Terrestrialism<\/a>. The footnotes direct you there (but if you wish to follow them and return here, just use the back button on your browser). <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Russo-Ukrainian war is an environmental war, for at least the following reasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. It is an environmental war because environmental destruction is a side effect of all wars.1<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. It is an environmental war because environments have been targeted by Russian forces\u2014because disabling Ukraine\u2019s economic potentials, including its agricultural fields, its ability to provide food for itself and the world, as well as its urban environments and industrial infrastructure, is a large part of the goals of the war.2<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. It is an environmental war because ecocide is the logical accompaniment to ethnocide or genocide,3<\/a> and the war is ethnocidal by the Russian government\u2019s own admissions.4<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

4. It is an environmental war because the causes of the war are primarily environmental, or at least ecopolitical and geostrategic. Russia is a petro-state whose economy depends, to an extent greater than with any major economy in the world, on the revenues from its oil and gas reserves.5<\/a> This means that as oil and gas become less valuable\u2014as they will with the world\u2019s energy transition toward non-carbon-emitting energy sources\u2014so will Russia\u2019s economy decline. This accounts for Russia\u2019s leading role (alongside the Arab oil producing countries and the Trump administration) in the international campaign to prevent concerted climate action on phasing out fossil fuels.6<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also makes the shoring up of Russian imperialism all the more strategically important. For historical as well as sentimental reasons, Russian imperial nationalists (including Putin) see Ukraine as central within that project.7<\/a> And in case the word \u201cimperial\u201d needs explanation here, it is helpful to recall that of all the European colonial empires that ruled much of the world directly one or two hundred years ago, Russia is the last one still standing, still unreconstructed by anti-colonial movements.8<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. It is an environmental war because Ukrainians\u2019 defense of their territory is rooted, to a degree greater than it would be in many places, in an understanding that Ukrainians and the land they live on\u2014their zemlia<\/em>\u2014make for a deeply valued partnership. It is not that Ukrainians haven\u2019t been displaced from that land by industrialization, mechanization of agriculture, and rural to urban migration, all of which the Soviet state ramped up to an intense degree, telescoping processes that took a few centuries in Britain, France, and elsewhere into the space of a century. The ways in which serfdom and other ethnopolitical-ecological relations imposed by the Russian empire, or by Polish rule, substantiated a certain relationship between Ukrainians and land is part of that equation. The legacy of Ukrainian connections to the land, a legacy retained and celebrated in poetry, music, and other forms of popular culture, is one that still retains a vibrancy at times when land is clearly under attack.9<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. To summarize the above, it is an environmental war in the same way that wars have always been environmental. This is a lesson of environmental history: wars have, for centuries, been fought between people defending land and their relationships with it from those who would like to replace those relationships with others that favor their own kind, that see their land as suitable for expansion, or extraction, or some other end. And while that process has gone on for millennia, there is an intensity and global reach to these expansionist wars in the last five centuries or so that has been undeniable\u2014an expansion over and against those people and places that are \u201cin the way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ukrainians and the Ukrainian land are \u201cin the way\u201d of Russia\u2019s neo-imperialist plans. (As they were during the Stalin-produced Holodomor<\/a> of the early 1930s.) This is analogous to the ways in which Indigenous peoples and their lands were \u201cin the way\u201d of European colonization, for centuries; and the way in which Palestinians are \u201cin the way\u201d of the Netanyahu regime\u2019s plan for a Greater Israel; and\u2026 add your own examples, of which there are many.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in a world of multipolar imperialisms, the only ethically defensible position is to extend solidarity to every<\/em> victim resisting every<\/em> and any<\/em> imperialism. The opposite of imperialism is not some vague and selective rhetorical \u201canti-imperialism.\u201d It is democratic self-determination that is rooted in one\u2019s place. It is tuteishist\u2019<\/a><\/em>, the defense of what is here, tut<\/a><\/em>, and globally it is the solidarity of the earthbound<\/a>.10<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

7. Finally, the Russo-Ukrainian war is environmental in the way that future<\/em> wars will all be environmental, in a world affected by climate disruptions, rising sea levels, intensifying weather disasters, and the demographic shifts, agricultural failures, economic hardships, and resource and land conflicts that will accompany these. The climate-destabilized world to come is the culmination of centuries of imperialist, extractivist, and colonial-capitalist \u201cresourcifying.\u201d11<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lessons from Ukrainians\u2019 resistance are thus lessons all of us (hopeful survivors) will need to learn. The sooner we recognize our shared precarity in the face of climate change, the sooner we will see the outlines of the \u201cecological class struggle\u201d to come<\/a>: a struggle of the \u201cglobal climate precariat\u201d against the \u201cfossil-fuel protectorate\u201d and its technopolitical allies, for whom the struggle to dominate is paramount, with all social and ecological costs offloaded onto others (or onto the future).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Communicating this shared condition of climate precarity is therefore of great importance, and it is a task for artists and media makers<\/a> as much as for anyone else. That\u2019s why Terra Invicta,<\/em> the book from which the above argument comes, puts such a strong emphasis on images and the work of artists. (That, of course, is consistent with my other work, such as The New Lives of Images<\/a><\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(To see the images Terra Invicta<\/em> works with\u2014in effect, counter-images to the destruction of the landscape portrayed in the satellite picture below\u2014you\u2019ll have to get the book. It is available from McGill-Queen\u2019s University Press<\/a>. But it is also open-access, available for free to all<\/a>. It is a book that Slavoj \u017di\u017eek says \u201cdeserves to become an instant classic, a volume that everyone who wants to grasp the contours of our global crisis should read.\u201d See also Marin Coudreau\u2019s wonderfully detailed review of it from the French radical ecology journal Terrestres<\/em>. entitled \u201c<\/em>Terre invaincue: la catastrophe \u00e9cologique \u00e0 la lumi\u00e8re de l\u2019Ukraine en guerre<\/a>.\u201d)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is cross-posted from Terrestrialism. The footnotes direct you there (but if you wish to follow them and return here, just use the back button on your browser). The Russo-Ukrainian war is an environmental war, for at least the following reasons. 1. It is an environmental war because environmental destruction is a side effect of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[688615],"tags":[711071,16902,25056,711292],"class_list":["post-14482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropo_scene","tag-russo-ukrainian-war","tag-ukraine","tag-war","tag-war-and-the-environment"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-3LA","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":14332,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2025\/11\/27\/terra-invicta-author-forum-open-access-info\/","url_meta":{"origin":14482,"position":0},"title":"Terra Invicta author forum & open-access info","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 27, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"Cross-posted from UKR-TAZ. I'm happy to share the news that Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth, the first English-language book-length anthology of wartime Ukrainian environmental humanities writing (and art), is out now -- and that it's available as a\u00a0fully open access\u00a0downloadable file thanks to McGill-Queen\u2019s University Press\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":14049,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2025\/04\/17\/forthcoming-books\/","url_meta":{"origin":14482,"position":1},"title":"Forthcoming books","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 17, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm happy to share the news that both The New Lives of Images and Terra Invicta are now available for pre-order. The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds is a theoretically and empirically rich study of images, imagination, and the digital. It's the fourth\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2894,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/03\/08\/cfp-rethinking-time-ecology\/","url_meta":{"origin":14482,"position":2},"title":"cfp: Rethinking Time & Ecology","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 8, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"CALL FOR PAPERS: Special Issue of Environmental Philosophy THEME: Temporal Environments: Rethinking Time and Ecology Details: GUEST EDITORS: Jacob Metcalf (UC Santa Cruz) and Thom van Dooren (University of Technology, Sydney) Place and space have received substantial attention in environmental philosophy in recent decades. Theorists from a variety of fields\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2134,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/01\/05\/environmental-humanities-series-update\/","url_meta":{"origin":14482,"position":3},"title":"Environmental Humanities series update","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 5, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Consider the Wilfrid Laurier University Press Environmental Humanities Series for your next manuscript... The new series poster is here. The Environmental Humanities Series features research that adopts and adapts the methods of the humanities to clarify the cultural meanings associated with environmental debate. The scope of the series is broad.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1035,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/26\/green-cultural-studies\/","url_meta":{"origin":14482,"position":4},"title":"Green cultural studies","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Cultural studies\" refers to the study of cultural objects, meanings, and processes, and their production and use in contemporary society. It is an interdisciplinary field with a twin commitment to intellectual rigor and social relevance. 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