In the war that Russia is waging in Ukraine with the aim of wearing down its opponent, the destruction of the infrastructure of human and more-than-human life – in short, the environment– plays an important role. As Svitlana Matviyenko argues in her contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, it is not only destruction but also reconstruction in occupied territories that is an expression of the aggressor’s necropolitics.
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A lot has been said about the resilience of Ukrainians, both those fighting and those experiencing the war far from the front lines. However, the scale and nature of Russia’s aggression far exceeds human endurance not least because the Kreml’s warfare uses the environment and its destruction as weapons, literally robbing those affected of the air they breathe.
Environments turned into death zones
Both journalists and scientists have documented how the war has already scarred ecosystems near and far. War-related pollution does not remain in one place; it seeps through soil and waterways, drifts across national borders, and lingers in the air. Overhead, the sky is a theater of drones, rockets, and the answering bursts of anti-aircraft fire. Even if it is not immediately deadly, the sky is a disorienting and disruptive environment for migratory birds that rely on acoustic cues for navigation and communication. Meanwhile, air pollution forces them to take longer and more erratic routes, which increases their energy expenditure. Rivers are toxic corridors laced with heavy metals and chemical effluents; dolphins and porpoises wash ashore in their hundreds along the Black Sea coast – casualties of acoustic trauma and poisoned waters. Forests are turned into burning reservoirs of carbon whose smoke drifts towards remote territories beyond Ukraine. Land is marked by mine-pocked scars that will take generations to heal, and once-fertile fields are now silent graveyards where seeds are struggling to germinate.
As we can see, some ecosystems recover relatively quickly. For instance, the remediated Lower Dnieper area rebounded and transformed after Russia’s military forces destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in June 2023, causing catastrophic flooding that took countless human and nonhuman lives. Yet other ecosystems such as the Ukrainian chornozem are damaged beyond repair.Depending on the severity of the damage, it may take anywhere from three years to two hundred years to restore the fertility of the fertile black soil. In Ukraine, this damage comes in the form of either crater and trench filling or the loss of soil density caused by the movement of heavy military vehicles that compress soil layers. This results in the need to replenish the soil’s organic matter and restore the normal life of microorganisms, as war, heat, and toxins destroy bacteria and fungi that are vital for nutrient cycling. In some areas, experts say farming may never be feasible again.
Ukraine, like the former Yugoslavia, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan, and Nagorno-Karabakh, has also been subjected to the war-related destruction of its urban environment and infrastructure necessary for human and other-than-human life. Martin Coward defines this deliberate destruction of cities as urbicide – a form of ontological military violence that aims to destroy ways of being-together by removing the conditions for coexistence through the demolition of the shared fabric that sustains it.
Erasing the infrastructure of life
And there is more: with Syria, Ukraine also shares the architects of urbicide, ecocide, and genocide. The generals, whose careers traverse both theaters of destruction, were decorated as ‘war heroes’ by the Russian president: Sergei Surovikin also known as the ‘General Armageddon,’ who fought in the Soviet-Afghan War, the Tajikistani Civil War, and the war in the Chechen Republic; Aleksandr Dvornikov, also known as the ‘Butcher of Syria,’ who was in charge of Russia’s intervention in Syria in 2015; Aleksandr Chaiko, who oversaw the Idlib operations, which were marked by severe civilian casualties, suppression of dissent, and widespread bombardment; Andrey Kartapolov, who coordinated Russia’s special operation in Aleppo and the recapture of Palmyra; Aleksandr Zhuravlyov, who commanded the siege of Aleppo; and Mikhail Mizintsev, also known as the ‘Butcher of Mariupol,’ who is infamous for directing the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Aleppo and Mariupol.
The political act of urbicide, when carried out by military forces, inevitably generates multifaceted environmental pollution that lingers long after the fighting ends. This complicates reconstruction efforts and poses serious health and ecological risks. Across Ukraine, many towns and cities have been partly reduced to ruins, echoing the devastation of Aleppo. These severely affected locations include Rubizhne, Bakhmut, Lysychansk, Popasna, Izyum, and Volnovakha. Maryinka, for instance, is almost entirely erased – down to the last few tree trunks.
Mariupol, one of the most emblematic sites of contemporary urbanized warfare, has been transformed by the occupying authorities into what amounts to a modern Potemkin village, a metaphor traced to Grigory Potemkin, a favorite and statesman of Empress Catherine II of Russia, known for installing fake villages consisting of painted façades along the Empress’ tour route to impress her with evidence of prosperity. History returns. In place of the devastated cityscape, the regime has staged a superficial reconstruction for propagandist channels: a scattering of showpiece apartment blocks and other showcase ‘developments’ meant to project an image of normalcy and renewal. Yet these façades rise amid the wreckage of the city’s core services: beneath the fresh paint and new walls, the essential urban infrastructure – sewage networks, water-supply systems, power grids, and public utilities – remains either dysfunctional or completely in ruins.
Weaponized environments
In the months after the full-scale invasion, it became clear that this form of pollution was anything but collateral. The notion of ‘pollution as a weapon of war’ is phrased by analogy with another established formula of military violence: ‘Rape is a weapon of war.’ The power of that phrase lies in its refusal to treat wartime rape as an unfortunate byproduct or collateral damage. Instead, it frames rape as a deliberate tactic in the arsenal of war – a weapon of terror aimed at bodies and communities that inscribes conquest on flesh and leaves wounds that reverberate across generations. Similarly, my inquiry refuses to view environmental pollution as merely the degradation of nature caused by military action. It examines the deliberate production of murderous environments: atmospheres and terrains engineered to suppress, immobilize, and annihilate both civilians and defenders of Ukraine.
As has recently been discussed in media theory, the environment is not a static backdrop, but rather a medium. It is artificial and synthetic. The environment is subject to design and is a means through which power can be carried out. In other words, to speak of weaponized environments is to confront their technicity: they are not simply given, but made. They are not merely ‘around us,’ but rather, they are actively configured as apparatuses of control. They are calibrated to carry terror beyond the battlefield and into the everyday life of bombarded cities. In this sense, as Peter Sloterdijk observed, weaponized environments are a modern technology of war.
The material composition of the weaponized environments is complex; they operate as what can be called an ‘ecology of harm.’ The human body and the environment are both cybernetic systems: interlaced and constantly exchanging signals – communicating. Terror exploits that interlacing. The matter that composes these terror-scapes is varied – solid, liquid, gaseous: rubble and dust, chemical plumes and poisoned water – each moving at its own pace, converging to turn the conditions of life into instruments of death. To these agents one must add sound, smell, and the constant flow of signals. In the time of war, Ukraine is an assemblage of the myriads of smaller and larger environments of terror, often overlapping in many ways, where the subjects of war experience suppression or terror.
Necropolitical normality
The most striking instance of such terror environments is found in the occupied territories of Ukraine – this war’s persistent grey zone. Here, those who endure the occupation become subjects of not only elemental violence – breathing in bad air, drinking poisoned water, and hearing the echoes of explosions from the nearby war – but also disinformation and propaganda. Falsehood operates less as simple deceit than as a force that must be negotiated. For the sake of sanity and sheer survival, many subjects of war accept it provisionally as truth – not because they are fooled, but because they choose an anchor in a world where reality itself has splintered. Reports continue to mount of gross violations of human rights, of systematic violence and acts approaching genocide. The erasure of ‘Ukrainian identity,’ the ‘re-education’ of children, and the forced mobilization of Ukrainians to fight against their own country expose, in the starkest terms, a deadly ecology of terror – one now at risk of being frozen beneath the deceptive label of ‘peace.’
When U.S. real-estate developer Steve Witkoff visited Moscow in mid-August 2025 – after acting as Donald Trump’s intermediary in talks with Vladimir Putin over the status of Ukraine’s seized territories – The Sunday Times quoted a source describing the envisioned settlement: “It’ll just be like Israel occupies the West Bank, with a governor, with an economic situation that goes into Russia, not Ukraine.” Although this claim was later denied, one thing is clear: the model it evokes is real. The likely post-war arrangement will resemble not the ‘German’ model of post-1945 reintegration but, rather, the Palestinian one. Will it amount to what Johan Galtung calls – problematically – ‘negative peace,’ a silence imposed by the absence of open violence by tanks, rockets and artillery, a pacification that masks suppression and imperial control rather than delivering genuine emancipation?
As many international organizations’ reports disclose, after three years of occupation, Russia has already built an infrastructure of systematic abuse: detention centers, torture chambers, filtration camps where Ukrainian civilians have been ‘processed’ within ‘death worlds.’ Any ‘peace’ forged on such foundations – where sovereignty includes the power to decide who may live and who must die – would be nothing if not screamingly necropolitical. And yet, once the word peace can be proclaimed, however cynically, who will still care to reckon with its true nature?