“Who is bold enough to declare part of the country a no-go zone for 100 years?”

Ukrainian article of the week published in the 64th edition of the "What about Ukraine" newsletter on February 6th, 2025. The article was written by Yuliya Surkova for The Ukrainians and was translated for n-ost by Tetiana Evloeva. Find the original article in Ukrainian here.

Photo credit: The Ukrainians. 

We schedule our meeting with environmental expert Oleksii Vasuliuk in the afternoon. Oleksii says he usually starts work after noon, as he routinely goes to bed in the small hours of the morning. After this interview, where he recounts all the ways that the war is destroying Ukraine’s nature, I am surprised he can sleep at all.

The expert lives outside Kyiv city limits, where he collects rare string instruments, looks after two gentle cats, and runs the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he helped create dozens of natural reserves in Ukraine. Today, he studies the impact of the hostilities on ecosystems. In this interview, he explains the dangers of eating food from crops grown in the demined fields, and why the frontline has turned green on satellite images.

Reporter: The effect that the landmines on the lives of ordinary Ukrainians can be seen through the horrific statistics of injuries due to this menace. How does the blight impact Ukrainian nature?

Oleksii Vasuliuk (OV): The mines per se are not as harmful as when they explode. Explosions destroy landscapes, killing off plants and animals alike, and most importantly, soil fauna, which are tiny animals that live in soil and are involved in its generation. Just one handful of soil can contain up to 5,000 tiny soil-forming animals that are only visible through a microscope. Without them, there’s no soil. All living things are killed off by the blast wave, which causes thermal damage, and brings contamination with chemicals. Any explosion is a chemical reaction, resulting in some of the chemicals being released into the air, some leaching into the soil, and others remaining in and around the crater.

Explosives per se are a great hazard, and that hazard only increases as they blow up. Some organisations involved in the demining effort may lack environmental awareness, which should be required.

Reporter: We are in a situation where natural reserves are being demined with no prior research about the impact.

OV: These reserves are habitats for endangered plants, and here they are, moving in heavy equipment and digging up the soil up to 1.5 metres deep, blowing up explosives they find there, killing off every living thing, because this is a cheap method. The natural reserve was better off while it was riddled with landmines, because nature was alive. Once that land gets demined, the mines are gone, but so is every trace of life.

Reporter: Are you implying that destroying the explosives on site can be an even greater hazard for the environment than just leaving them be?

OV: Demining requires preliminary exploration. For me, one of the greatest concerns is that while we can’t be sure whether this mined area is safe before demining, the chances of it being safe after demining [through controlled explosions] are even slimmer.

[Those working on demining] often say, ‘The area is contaminated with explosives’, which misleads people into thinking that demining does the trick of decontaminating the said area. However, that’s not always the case.

This is how it goes. A liberated community is itching to be able to use their land ASAP, and, for instance, they can approach a private demining organisation that makes money out of demining. Such an organisation uses whatever methods they can to demine the area, and they report back to their client: ‘It’s all cool and ready for use’. However, their preferred methods make all the difference in whether their demining effort leads to more contamination. If the levels of that additional contamination are too high, the fields become unusable.

Reporter: Does Ukraine run any tests to determine the levels of contamination and quality of soil in the mined or demined areas?

OV: No. For a short time, the European Parliament set up the High-Level Working Group on the Environmental Consequences of the War in Ukraine. With the European ministers of ecology and, on our side, head of the president’s office Andrii Yermak and our former minister of ecology as its members, the Group drafted an environmental treaty for Ukraine. Even Greta Thunberg was listed as a member, though more as a talisman, I guess, for I don’t think she made any actual input in the draft. The group presented a recovery strategy for Ukraine, which failed to even mention soil quality assessment. Thus, there’s no designated funding from our partners as of today.

Some organisations, pursuing their own interests, conducted such assessments locally, however, none of them is in any way linked to the central government.

Reporter: Does Ukraine have funds for that kind of assessment?

OV: It’s not even on the table. We could ask our partner countries for help, because it’s a fraction of the cost of a unmanned aerial vehicle or a tank.

So should, say, Germany or France be unable to give us certain types of weapons, but still want to help, their laboratories could accept our soil samples for testing. They have more of those laboratories than we can imagine, and they could fund that testing, and make it free for Ukraine.

With those test results of our soil samples, and findings of the EU experts, we could bring ourselves closer to EU standards.

Therefore, I’m convinced that every Ukrainian ministry not directly dealing with military matters, but responsible for agriculture and environmental matters, should be working on that with our partners. That’s something that certainly doesn’t require some global political moves or huge costs, and would not be such a burden for the national budget of, say, Germany.

This would help speed up the demining process, guarantee our safety for decades and even centuries to come and improve our image in the eyes of our partners even now. Otherwise, we risk being careless during demining, rendering our arable lands unusable.

Reporter: What chemicals can enter our bodies through soil and food contamination from explosions?

OV: The range is quite wide. Some of them are heavy metals present in the soil, which are absorbed by crops and subsequently end up in our bodies.

Since humans are, conventionally, at the top of the food chain, we are the ones who ultimately accumulate those metals in our bodies.

Sulphur presents another problem. Recently (in 2018) there was a crisis at the Crimean chemical plant Titan, where winds dispersed sulphuric dioxide waste from the factory over a large area. Wherever that sediment fell, the plants just died, because whenever sulphur or its compounds comes into contact with water, sulphuric acid is created.

Exploding munitions containing sulphur contaminates everything in the vicinity, and from that point forward, it all depends on the weather. Conditions such as wet soil, dew, fog, rain, snow or even heat that evaporates water can create sulphuric acid, killing off the small soil organisms.

This will turn the post-explosion sites into dead zones with ‘dead soil’, which will take years and even decades to recover.

Reporter: Are you saying that today, we can’t be sure whether the grains we buy in the store — or crops that we export — are free of chemicals from explosions?

OV: We can’t be sure they are safe to consume. And I believe that’s something we should be talking about. After all, if the EU is really willing to accept us, we will have to meet their standards anyway.

Reporter: Have you made any changes in your diet after the full-scale invasion? Perhaps you no longer buy produce grown in the areas of recent hostilities?

OV: I haven’t changed my diet because nobody — neither you nor I — is able to identify such produce. Unfortunately, reading the labels only gives us some idea where those goods were packaged. Nobody is going to warn you that the grain was grown on land contaminated with heavy metals, or on land which nobody bothered to check for such contamination.

One thing we can identify for sure is the produce made in the occupied parts of our country. For example, Artemivsk salt [from mines near the occupied city of Bakhmut] can still be found in our stores. However, all of it was produced before the invaders took over.

The same goes for buying Ukrainian produce abroad: you can’t be sure of their quality. Perhaps, a small fraction of that produce is the fly in the ointment of our overall export.

Reporter: Which is why Ukraine asking our partners to help us with testing soil samples will only improve our image as an exporter. It will show that we care for the safety of not only our consumers, but also those who buy our produce abroad.

OV: Wouldn’t that be wonderful? And yet, nobody bothers to do that.

Reporter: So how do we deal with the areas where the levels of contamination are skyrocketing?

OV: First, we have to understand what those plots of land are used for. Because if they are farmland, we need to choose tailored demining methods.

Perhaps, the area is already contaminated to the point that it is unfit for growing produce. Even in that case, there are alternatives. We could use it to grow energy crops like willow, to be used as firewood. If that is impossible, we could use that land to install solar power plants.

Before any decisions are made, we need to do our research and run tests. And by no means should we be doing what often makes headlines, like: “Yay, farmers in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast are already working the land that was liberated just recently!”

I totally get it that those farmers need to work their land to earn money, but as a consumer, I want to rest assured that I’m not eating produce from those fields.

The State Standardisation Agency, along with the Ministry of Agrarian Policy, could take it upon themselves to deal with this issue, initiate partnerships to sample the soils and run them through all the necessary tests, and raise awareness in local communities. But the problem is, that will be politically unsustainable. Should we tell people that even after the war is over, some areas would be still deemed unfit to use or return to, which might discourage them to come back?

Reporter: Which means, there will be areas where we will have restricted access.

OV: That’s right. We will have to restrict the areas with the highest contamination levels and let nature reclaim them for recovery. The easiest way would be to abandon them altogether, as we did with the Chornobyl area, which became one of the largest wild forests in central Europe. Of course, it was a hard decision to make, and yes, nobody back then expected the residents of the exclusion zone would need to be permanently resettled. However, it went as it went, and nature recovered without any human intervention.

Today, wildlife is in full swing there. Perhaps that’s something we may eventually have to do with the Kakhovka reservoir [in Kherson oblast, where a dam was destroyed in 2023, causing mass flooding] and other areas: abandon them as exclusion zones. That way, we can assume that those areas will be repopulated by nature faster, and not wait for permission from humankind.

Reporter: Is there any relevant international experience in putting mined areas off limits?

OV: That’s what we are trying to figure out. A search in English will produce quite a few pieces on La Zone Rouge, the Red Zone, which is a chain of non-continuous areas in France, on the border with Belgium, where heavy fighting took place at Verdun during the First World War. After the war was over, the French government chose to isolate that area, despite its size. Today, more than a hundred years later, that area is still closed off, and parts of it are forbidden to access.

Reporter: That’s an exclusion zone where you can’t even go. To us, that’s the most important example to take into consideration.

OV: Over the past 106 years, France never changed its mind regarding the status of that area. Which means, the passing of a century did nothing to eliminate the chemical residue after the heavy use of munitions.

When it comes to Avdiivka or Bakhmut, where the hostilities went over the top, we could rebuild dwellings there, but planting anything in that soil would be out of the question. So why rebuild a city where you can’t plant a single tree or shrub near your home?

But nobody even mentions that here. Who is bold enough to proclaim 40 percent of the country a no-go zone for humans for the next 100 years?

Reporter: Is there any chance to recover forests in east Ukraine that are being burnt down due to shelling and mine explosions?

OV: The entire East of Ukraine is in the steppe zone, so naturally, it would have been steppes all along. However, at some point in the past, forests were planted there.

Take the large cities like Siverodonetsk and Rubishne [both under Russian occupation in the Donbas region]. Were they built in the middle of the steppe, with its constant dry winds that get cold come winter, living there would be impossible. That is why Imperial Russia [that conquered most of Ukraine, — translator’s note] spent quite a lot of money to plant forests along the rivers, so more people could settle there.

People who were born in those cities in our modern age, have no idea what it was like to live in the harsh steppe climate, for they grew up enjoying the moisture and shelter offered by those forests — something known as ‘ecosystem services’, which are the unpaid benefits that humans receive from nature.

However, all those forests, from Izium [on the Donets river in Kharkiv oblast] and further along the Siverskyi Donets river, burned down.

I’m not sure they can be recovered, because those forests were planted in the 1930s, before climate change kicked in. Of course, many foresters will be tempted to embezzle money by planting pine trees that will not be able to grow there. That would create a number of jobs in the forestry companies and would be convenient for them. If we want these forests to recover by themselves, the most likely composition will be a quilt of foliage forest and sections of steppe, which had been the case before those man-made forests were first planted. Those forests must be given a chance to recover — even if it means not allowing pines to grow there. But you can’t make money out of nature reclaiming those forests, so the forestries will be unhappy with that proposal.

Reporter: The war disfigures human settlements. While travelling for work to the East and South of the country, I often come across villages overgrown with acacia. It even took over the abandoned schools and hospitals. Is that a problem for the ecosystem?

OV: Invasive species really spread fast, like weeds. Examples of these are ragweed or woody plants: acacia, quince, olive or maples. Take a close look at some abandoned villages in Ukraine, and you will see they are overgrown with maples and acacias. Those are more aggressive than the local species and better suited to survive fires — as they are originally from North America, where wildfires are plentiful. This is why, wherever our native plants recede, those invasive species take over, as they can recover much quicker. They have no problem taking over plots of damaged land, for instance, along the roadside where the grass routinely burns.

If you look at a recent satellite image of the frontline, it’s bright green. This area stretches from Enerhodar [under occupation in Zaporizhzhia Oblast] and further east and north, covering over a million hectares, and is composed of acacias and olive trees. That entire territory is riddled with landmines. As the frontline is fluctuating, everything further behind it becomes overgrown with those trees.

Reporter: How do we demine the land under those newly-emerged forests?

OV: Now that’s an interesting question. Just imagine the unlikely situation of, say, Putin dying tomorrow morning, and somehow every last Russian leaves the territory of Ukraine by the end of the week. Collaborators are fleeing, residents are catching them and locking them up in some sheds to hand them over to the SBU, and everyone is happy. What happens next?

We find ourselves in a situation where our country is super riddled with landmines, and is the most mined country in the world. Estimates for demining range from 75 to 100 years, which is definitely beyond the lifespan of any Ukrainian.

In one hundred years those landmines will be deeply embedded in the roots of some trees, somewhere deep underground. How do we get them out? Who is going to do it?

Reporter: Which means, we would have to at least burn those forests down before we do anything. Because we wouldn’t even be able to bring in heavy equipment to cut them down.

OV: It may seem incomprehensible now, but we might have to burn down forests with flamethrowers to open the way for us to return to our abandoned villages.

Imagine what the rest of the world would be thinking about us, given their efforts to regrow their forests? Still, I currently have no answer as for what we can do with those areas.

Reporter: It’s unsettling to realise that one hundred years from now, Ukraine and its nature will be completely different…

OV: That’s too big of an issue now. When we look at the forest that emerged in the place of the former Kakhovka reservoir, we see it being reclaimed by the beautiful wildlife that used to be abundant in those places before the reservoir was built. Bucha and Irpin, which sustained considerable levels of destruction, are faring pretty well, too. Which is a great example of how once abandoned places can be buzzing with life again — it’s just that the scenarios for reclaiming those spaces can vary.

If we talk about life reclaiming the minefields, perhaps the solution will be stretched over time; it will definitely take longer than any of us will live.

Reporter: So we must rely on the next generations of Ukrainians to see the process of demining through to the end.

OV: One day, in a hundred years from now, Ukrainians will be admiring entirely different wild forests that will have overtaken the areas we were forced to abandon. And they will no longer perceive it as tragically as we do. The next generations of Ukrainians will not see them through the lens of personal loss, and perhaps, they will really love the forest that will have reclaimed the former Kakhovka reservoir, or the present-day frontline.