Russia’s attack is literally tearing Ukraine apart, polluting air and water. Ukrainians will suffer long after the conflict ends.
have come under fire from Russian planes and artillery. Those weapons have the potential to leave not only immediate destruction, but a longer tail of polluted air and water that will be felt by nearby residents long after the conflict subsides.
Since the mid-1990s conflict in Kosovo, the United Nations has tried to reel in the environmental harms in conflict zones and hasten cleanup in the aftermath. But some countries, including Russia, have pushed back on setting up guardrails, Weir notes. “They take quite a fatalistic approach to environmental damage in conflict as the cost of doing business,” he says.
Not that issues like pollution are top of mind while air raid sirens are ringing across the country, notes Andriy Andrusevych, an environmental lawyer based in Lviv, Ukraine. The country is currently flying blind in terms of watching industrial emissions, he adds, since pollution monitoring systems are largely offline or going unchecked. But as a heavily industrialized country, Ukraine already had a baseline of bad air.
This air pollution will be wildly complex, due to the nature of modern war. Missiles, shelling, and tank rounds are chewing up pretty much the entirety of the built environment. Explosions fling a wide array of materials into the air, from heavy metals in industrial sites to the concrete, cables, and piping in roads, to asbestos from buildings.
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