Viktoria Hubareva
Translated by Alastair Gill
The Russian Federation is beginning to shift responsibility for the environmental crimes it has committed on Ukrainian soil… to Ukraine itself. We examine the “logic” behind Russia’s accusations. How is this justified and how does it differ from the Ukrainian approach to environmental war crimes?
On September 18, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) published a text “On Ukraine’s responsibility for the degradation of the environment in the region.” UWEC Work Group understands from undisclosed sources that this “report” was sent by the Russian Consulate General in Bonn to several international organizations.
In short, the “report” contains accusations against Ukraine for environmental crimes it has allegedly committed, based on data largely taken from Ukrainian media. While in general the text represents, as UWEC Work Group expert Eugene Simonov puts it, “an example of blunt propaganda”, its very appearance in the information space shows an interesting pivot in the context of Russian rhetoric in its information war against Ukraine. Indeed, Russia had previously paid no attention to the topic of environmental crimes in the media space, with the exception of several mentions in 2014 of Ukraine’s closure of the North Crimean Canal, via which water from the Dnieper River is supplied to Crimea. But in the fall of 2023 Russia again began talking about the North Crimean Canal.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is confused… about geography
Even now, the Russian Foreign Ministry still harks back to the events of 2014: “The available data indicates that Kiev, during its aggression against Crimea and Donbas since 2014, has used methods that cause serious long-term damage to the environment,” they write on the ministry’s website.
UWEC Work Group expert Oleksiy Vasyliuk comments: “We should note here that until 2023 there was no military action in Crimea at all. And everything that happened in 2023 had no impact on nature, it was high-precision strikes on military infrastructure and equipment illegally placed by the Russians in Crimea.”
Similar “blunders” are found in each successive sentence. For example, Russia’s MFA states that after the closure of the North Crimean Canal, significant areas at the mouth of the Dnieper were flooded.
“This is quite ridiculous, this is the first time someone has come up with this,” says Vasyliuk. “Water was pumped into the canal and the Dnieper valley was ‘flooded’ only once – after the terrorist attack on the Kakhovka hydropower station,” he explains.
The following paragraph gives the impression that the authors of the text have never seen a map of Ukraine:
“In the next eight years of Kiev’s military actions against breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk, colossal damage was caused to the ecosystems and biodiversity of a number of national parks, in particular the Askania-Nova Biosphere Reserve,” the MFA wrote in its statement.
It appears they didn’t consider that Askania-Nova is several hundred kilometers distant from the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. The biosphere reserve only began to be occupied in 2022, which means it could not have suffered “in the course of eight years of war,” the Russian MFA reported.
Most of the MFA’s report is devoted to the Kakhovka hydropower station. However, there is a serious mistake there too. The authors make the claim that rapid flooding caused by the blowing up of the dam led to the inundation of the Velykyi Luh National Park. In fact, Velykyi Luh is located much further upstream of the Kakhovka plant.
“It was emptied rather than flooded,” says Vasyliuk.
Read more about the restoration of Velykyi Luh after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in our article:
No need for facts, since ‘everything is clear to everyone’
In this September “report,” the Russian Federation again recalled the events of 2014, mentioning “eight years of war” in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. Without bothering to provide facts, situational analysis, or even links to the media, the MFA wrote about “large-scale pollution of water bodies, soil, and air with dangerous chemicals” in eastern Ukraine.
“The document, although it states that ‘the environmental crimes of the armed forces of Ukraine are well documented,’ does not provide any reference to specific information sources,” says Eugene Simonov. “This deprives the text of any credibility for the audience – the content cannot be verified. In general, this is a well-known and typical example of common propaganda tactics…”
In the majority of cases, the authors simply don’t bother themselves with description, quantitative, or qualitative evaluation of the environmental consequences.
Simonov also draws attention to the fact that the statement about “the mass use of outdated naval mines by Ukraine, which has caused the pollution of the vast Black Sea with hazardous substances” is unfounded. The Russian “report” specifies neither hazardous substances, nor their concentrations in sea waters, nor exactly how obsolete mines pollute vast areas of water. Previous detailed analyses of the harm caused by Soviet mines deployed by Ukraine to protect its coastline made no mention of the “pollution of vast water areas.” Indeed, this is highly improbable, even if all 5,000 mines laid by Ukraine were to explode at the same time. This would be an utterly insignificant outcome in the Black Sea when compared to other pollutants.
Main dish on the table of Russia’s accusations: Destruction of the Kakhovka dam
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs paid significant attention to the largest environmental disaster to have occurred in Ukraine since the Russian invasion in 2022: bombing of the Kakhovka hydropower station dam. The MFA, of course, accuses Ukraine of this in its publication.
Oleksiy Vasyliuk sees this as a particularly interesting feature of Russian polemics. In his view, the fact that the aggressor is devoting attention to the subject betrays a certain concern.
“It is interesting that the document also states that ‘the final blow’ to the Kakhovka HPP ‘was dealt by blowing up the Kakhovka HPP’s foundational structures on 6 June 2023.’ Engineers and military experts alike are unanimous in their conclusion that such an “explosion” could only have been carried out within the dam, an area to which access was completely controlled by Russian troops. Therefore, the MFA’s thesis that the Ukrainian side is culpable in blowing up the dam is unconvincing and is completely unsupported,” says Simonov.
Turning the evidence inside out
As Simonov points out, 50% of the document consists of recognizable facts about the destruction caused by the war that may already be familiar to readers.
“The reason for this is that the facts are mainly borrowed (without mentioning the authors) from authoritative Ukrainian and international sources that analyze and systematize information about the consequences of the war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine. Only here each paragraph ends with the refrain that this is evidence of Kyiv’s environmental crimes,” he says.
For example, the number of settlements flooded as a result of the destruction of the dam is taken from a statement made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the wake of the disaster. He mentions flooding of four dozen settlements, while other figures in the media point to up to 80 settlements.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs obtained information about the size of the flooded areas from a report by a Ukrainian public organization.
“Researchers compiling information do not always understand the meaning of the evidence they cite. Hence, for example, the ridiculous statement that after the breaching of the Kakhovka hydropower station, ‘more than 280,000 hectares were in the flood zone.’ My guess is that this is a distorted quote from the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group’s estimates of the area where changes to the water regime occurred as a result of the destruction of the dam: 210,000 hectares of the reservoir were drained and 70,000 hectares of downstream areas were flooded. But the Russian accusers did not take the time to figure out that these were two opposite processes, instead attributing everything to “flooding” in order to equate it with an ‘area the size of Luxembourg’,” notes Simonov.
“The claim that Ukraine has been using weapons with depleted uranium can also be placed in the same basket of golden quotes from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The text says that this ‘led to dire long-term consequences for the region’.”
“The Russians themselves are using depleted uranium munitions to full effect, while they basically give off no more radiation than the steps of a granite staircase”, says Vasyliuk. Since American shells have only just begun to be delivered to the region, then from the context it follows that it was Russian access and use of munitions armed with Svinets-2 depleted uranium that led to “dire long-term consequences for the region.”
Quotes taken out of context
Some of the quotes used in the report are incomplete, distorting the meaning of what was said. For example, back in December 2022, Major General Andriy Kovalchuk, who led the counteroffensive, told The Washington Post about plans by the Ukrainian armed forces to raise the water level in the Dnieper in order to flood Russian river crossing areas. This could have been done by making a hole in the dam, and although tests showed that this would work, the idea was abandoned in order to avoid disastrous consequences. The exact wording of the Washington Post article was as follows:
“Kovalchuk considered flooding the river. The Ukrainians, he said, even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages.
The test was a success, Kovalchuk said, but the step remained a last resort. He held off.”
Despite the fact that the text was published on the website of a supposedly highly responsible government agency with a duty to supply an international audience with well-balanced and analyzed facts, those who prepared the “report” simply truncated the above quote, presenting it in this way, as if it were a fact confirming Ukraine’s intentions to blow up the dam.
Why shifting the blame won’t work
Obviously, responsibility for environmental damage resulting from military actions lies primarily with those who started the war and seized foreign territories, says Simonov.
“Otherwise, it would be necessary to strictly hold Ukraine accountable for polluting and littering the sea by sinking the cruiser Moskva or for damage to the natural plant communities on Snake Island during the operation to rid the island of occupying forces. In both cases, there was very real environmental damage and it was inflicted at the hands of the Ukrainian military as a last resort in the fight against the aggressor. But for some reason, the Russian side coyly avoids these “Ukrainian environmental crimes” in its propaganda document,” the expert notes.
A new weapon in Russia’s information war
Disinformation, an example of which is discussed in this article, is in itself nothing new for Russian war propaganda. The aggressor country has been shifting the blame for actions committed by Russian invaders in Ukraine since the very beginning of the war in 2014 and stepped up its efforts significantly after the start of the full-scale invasion.
Russia has previously accused Ukrainian armed forces of the bombardment of the drama theater in Mariupol (destroyed by Russian aerial bombs), and in Saltivka district in Kharkiv (where the occupiers shelled a residential area during the storming of Kharkiv), and of many other Russian attacks. The accusation published on the MFA’s website is therefore noteworthy: it is not about shifting responsibility for Russia’s own crimes, but something completely different.
The very fact that the document was published not by the relevant environmental ministry, but by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, suggests that Russian propaganda will soon feature a new “environmental” agenda, one which the aggressor country will not hesitate to pursue.
Instead of publishing baseless statements, however, Ukraine is now gathering information on Russia’s environmental crimes. The Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office has already recorded 265 war crimes committed by the Russian army against the environment and 14 cases of ecocide. That agency’s dedicated subdivision, the Specialized Environmental Prosecutor’s Office, is engaged in the investigation and documentation of environmental crimes.
How should Ukraine respond?
To learn how Ukraine will respond to this new point on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s environmental agenda (including the use of statements unsupported by facts) we consulted the relevant Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources Protection of Ukraine (MENRPU), which is also taking part in the documentation of environmental crimes.
That ministry cited a figure that differed from the data supplied by the Prosecutor General’s Office: “The state Environmental Inspectorate of Ukraine has recorded over 2,705 events caused by the war that have inflicted damage upon the environment. The total cost of the damage for soil pollution and land contamination is 1,007 billion hryvnia, 1,080 billion hryvnia in air pollution, and 73 billion hryvnia of damage caused to water bodies,” reported the MENRPU.
The MENRPU also stated directly that work has already begun on recording the Russian armed force’s environmental crimes in Ukraine, a process involving numerous government agencies and specialists.
“More than 170 Ukrainian prosecutors from four regions and specialist departments, as well as over 250 investigators from the National Police and security services were involved in gathering evidence,” reads the official response.
Meanwhile, it is completely unclear which Russian agency is recording “environmental crimes by Ukraine” and how this is being done.
As for those who may suggest that shelling has been carried out by “both sides,” the Ukrainian ministry’s response is also unequivocal:
“The aggressor bears full responsibility for the illegal, unjustified, and unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine, which has also seriously endangered global environmental security. It must also carry responsibility for all the damage it has caused to the environment and make reparations.”
Main image source: Kyiv Post
