Short Wave - Russia's War In Ukraine Is Hurting Nature

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

The war in Ukraine is devastating that nation's rich, natural environment - from chemical leaks poisoning water supplies and warships killing dolphins to explosions disrupting bird migrations. NPR Environmental Correspondent Nate Rott has been reporting from Ukraine. He sits down with Short Wave's Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber to talk about how the Russian invasion is harming the environment even beyond Ukraine's borders. Read more of Nate's reporting: https://n.pr/3PkuKcEWant to get in touch? Reach the show by emailing [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hello, Nate Wraught. Welcome back to Shortwave. Hello, Regina. It is very nice to finally audio meet you. It's nice to meet you, too. I heard you just came back from Ukraine. I did, yeah. So I'm a part of a crew of NPR reporters and producers who have been cycling in and out of Ukraine since Russia invaded back in late February and really in the weeks leading up to the war. But in your day job, you're an environment reporter on NPR's climate team, right? I am. And the reason I wanted to talk to you today is because I actually got a chance to do some environment and climate reporting in Ukraine during my last stint.

So what does that involve? It involves a lot of travel. We made it to basically every side of the country. Wow. But the place I want to take you is in northern Ukraine. So come with me real quick to an ecological inspection laboratory in the northern Ukrainian town of Jitomer. That's that. Wow.

Yes. You know, the beakers gave it away. A little glass bottle. We, they did it, how they know, how it's it, proberga. So that person you were hearing, that was Yevgeny Medvedevsky. He's with the country's Office of Ecological Inspection. And the reason that we were there with him is we had seen and heard about a lot of

environmental destruction across a country while we were reporting there. We had felt missile strikes. And we were curious about what all of that was doing to Ukraine, one of the most biodiversity-rich countries in Europe. And I imagine what you found wasn't good. No, it was not. Here's the head of the lab we are in. Her name is Irina Berezouk, describing what they've been finding as they take soil samples around missile strikes, 200, 300 yards away from the place of impact. And still, all the levels of the chemicals were more than normal. The further you went out.

Yeah, because of the blast wave, there's some fumes and they settle on the surface, so they contaminate the surface anyway. So today on Shortwave, the ecological effects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And the long-term damage that's being done. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. So, Nate, you saw a lot of ecological damage while reporting in Ukraine. What does that look like? It looks like shredded trees and miles and miles and miles of trench dug into the earth.

It looks like flooded plains from destroyed dams and overgrown trails because National Park staff are now enlisted to fight in the war. And it looks a lot like the place we visited after seeing that laboratory. So now we're going to take a moment to listen to Nate's piece. Brown leaves and short shoots of green grass blink at the forest floor in these woods west of the northern Ukrainian town of Jietomer. Our guide, Victor Radishinsky, excitedly IDs the tall trees on either side. It's a more dero. Beach. The same in California.

The same in California. I live in California. He lives in California. Radishinsky is part of a team of ecological and environmental inspectors who are here to show us a small example of the environmental damage caused by Russia's invasion. Roughly a quarter mile into the woods, we have. hit a wide trench dug into the forest floor. It was dug out to prevent fire spreading. So this is a fire line we're walking on it.

On the other side of the trench, the forest floor is scorched black, and there's a tangle of downed burnt trees. A gash, maybe 20 yards across, has been cleaved through the canopy above, and debris dots the ground all around. These are the pieces of the plane. Earlier in the war, a Ukrainian fighter jet and a dog fight with two Russian planes crashed into these woods. A jagged piece of metal is lodged into a burnt tree some 20 feet overhead. So the plane crashed here and started a wildfire? The 27-year-old pilot, the chief of the region's disaster.

It exploded. The 27-year-old pilot did not survive. Yevgeny Medvedovsky, the chief of the region's Department of Ecological Inspection, says Ukraine's military took the bulk of the wreckage away from this area more than two months ago. But you can still smell the jet fuel that seeped into the ground, a concern for the water supplies of two nearby villages. This pollution, Medvedovsky says, will be with this place for a long time. Medvedovsky and other ecological inspectors around the country have been coming to sites like this

wherever they can, collecting soil samples, water, and air. They're visiting fuel depots destroyed by Russian missile strikes, industrial sites and factories, battlefields and blast sites. Many places are still inaccessible or still occupied by Russia. All of the information is then sent on to Kiv to the country's lead office of environmental inspection, and its head Olexi Oberzon. We've documented more than 300 cases of ecological damage since Russia's invasion began, Oberzon says, but the total cases could be upwards of 1,500. The evidence Oberzan says is being collected to charge Russia with potential environmental

war crimes, even though there's not much precedent in international courts for that. I ask why the world should care. about environmental damage given the horrific crimes against people suffered in Buccia, Mariupil, and the country's east. The world now knows about Ukraine, Oberzahn says, and the problems it's facing. But these environmental problems aren't just Ukrainians, he stresses. They cross borders. They are the worlds.

To get a better sense of that larger impact, we went to Tuzlovski Lagoon's National Park, along the Black Sea in the grass-covered step of Ukraine's southern coast. This is pretty. It's a big area. It's about 27,000 hectares. Ivan Rusev helped create this national park. And even though this area doesn't have crashing jets, parts of this park were bombed, and much of its beaches are now covered in mines.

And Rusev says the impact of the war here is devastating. Start with the normally huge population of migratory birds. They disappear because it was very big noise from the bombing. Dolphins, he says, affected by the low-frequency sonar used by Russian warships, have been washing up on shore. We estimate that all dolphins which is died from this war, about 2,000 dolphins dying during three months.

Then there's the fires. Fire is a big problem. For example, about 15 kilometers, it was a big fire. to weeks ago. Fire started by a flare that was difficult to contain because of mines. Zoom out, and there are concerns that Russia's invasion of Ukraine could make regular wildfires difficult to contain in other parts of the world as well. Last year, Turkey, northern Russia, Greece, and other parts of Europe experienced devastating

wildfire seasons. We're looking at the exact same pattern we had last year, so very, very hot and very, very dry. Scott Denish is the wildfire. an emergency systems coordinator for USAID. Many of the firefighting aircraft for Western Europe and the Middle East come from Russia because of sanctions and because of those aircrafts unavailability because of the war, those are off the table now. Wildfires in Siberia, which have an outsized impact on the world's climate,

Dennett Ches, are going unsuppressed. This war is outside of even just Ukraine. It really has multiple exponential layers of damage it's doing. To the world's climate and its time. declining biodiversity. Back at Tuzlovsky Lagoon's National Park on the Black Sea, Irina Vikyushchuk, the park's director, steps out of the car into tall grass next to the still waters of a neighboring lagoon. Normally, she says, we'd be seeing huge flocks of migratory birds resting on this water's surface as they make their journeys north and west. This year, she says,

they've mostly been scared away. A short trip away past a string of anti-tank mines hidden in the grass, we reach the Black Sea. And a long, empty stretch of shell-specled sand. This place has the most amazing

sunrises and sunsets. Viky Shuk says, it's normally like heaven. Looking out towards the Black Sea, she says when Ukraine wins this war. Not if. She hopes people will visit this park again, whatever state it's in. And hopefully, she says, it will help them heal.

Wow, Nate, that is devastating. What can be done to help alleviate some of the damage you just described? Time. I mean, it's going to take a really long time. And it will likely take a lot of foreign investment. Ukraine, as you heard, is hoping that Russia will fork the bill for some of the damage it's done. But first, the war's got to end. There's no signs of that happening. And even then, it's going to be hard to get Russia to pay for some of these ecological damages because there's just not really a whole lot of precedent around the world. And the wildfire situation you just described with Europe and the Middle East relying on Russia for firefighting aircraft, do we know if that's having an effect now? It is, yeah. So there are currently massive wildfires burning in Spain and Portugal and different parts of Europe. Yeah, we were just in Spain and we saw the aftermath of fire and we saw one of the helicopters, the firefighting aircraft, go by us.

Whoa, no kidding. I mean, it's been a really crazy fire season. Last year, they had a bad fire season. This year, they're having a bad fire season. So it's a huge thing. And right now, there's even bigger fires that are burning in northern Russia, an area where wildfires are really not a good thing for the planet because of the outsized impact they have on global climate change. So the broader environmental implications of this war are just huge. Nate Rod, thank you so much for your work on this. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. We'll be back later this summer with more on the war in Ukraine. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Rebecca Ramirez, edited by Stephanie O'Neill and fact-checked by Rachel Carlson. The audio engineer was Maggie Luthar. Special thanks to translators Olena Lisenko and Hanna Paula Marenko. Giselle Grayson is our senior supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Anya Grunman is our senior vice president of programming.

I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.