One thousand days since Putin’s Russia launched its full-scale attack on Ukraine, the country’s once great forests have been devastated in the hellscape of war. “They’re dead now,” said Serhiy Tsapok, a 41-year-old ranger who has spent the last two decades nursing the country’s timber stock, once considered a source of national pride.
“Now, when I’m driving, it’s better to just stare at the road.”
Serhiy Tsapok, a long time Ukrainian forest ranger devasted at the damage caused by constant aerial bombardment and shelling.
So far, at least 1.7 million hectares of Ukrainian forests have been destroyed in the theatre of war – with the level of destruction coming as the casualties in the meatgrinder have passed 1 million dead or wounded.
The vast majority of these forests are in Russian-occupied regions (making up 20% of Ukraine’s landmass) and are dense and easily flammable pine forests—mostly Chalk pine, a subspecies of Scots pine—subject to heavy aerial bombardment or shelled so intensively that they have been ground down into nothing more than a field of stumps.
Last year, Wood Central revealed that occupied forest areas and forest areas on the front line of battle equated “to more than 1 million hectares of areas designated for sustainable forest management,” with heavy disturbance in aboveground ecosystems, soils and water systems causing irreversible damage to forest health.
As it stands, Ukrainian forests are now amongst the most dangerous on earth, with about 425,000 hectares of forest found to be contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance, an area half the size of Cyprus – with authorities yet to inspect 3 million hectares of forest, which are or have been occupied by Russian forces and riddled with mines and ordnance.
According to Ukrainian officials, the Russian military, who have occupied, retreated and occupied lands multiple times over the 31-month conflict, have left booby traps and tripwires behind as they retreated:
“If we want to extinguish a fire quickly, it’s impossible because the entire territory is mined,” said Ruslan Strilets, who until recently was Ukraine’s environment minister. “There is a risk of being killed or maimed.”
Tending to these forests is now a dangerous occupation, with mines and unexploded shells hidden in the ground posing the biggest threat.
Oleksandr Polovynko, a 39-year-old ranger, nearly lost a foot after stepping on a mine while tending the forest last year: “I crawled back to the car and drove home with one leg,” he told Reuters. “It took him six months to return to work.”
Indeed, on top of serious injuries, 14 forest workers have been killed by landmines, booby traps and shelling during the conflict, according to environment ministry data. According to Reuters, who spoke to forest rangers, ecologists, demining experts and government officials, Russian munitions have burned through vast tracts of the area, once a rare and beloved beauty spot in a heavily industrialised region.
“What we have lost is enormous,” said Serhiy Pryimachuk, the director of the Sviati Hory National Park, a forest that borders Eastern Ukraine and Russia. Repairing it will take decades and cost billions of dollars. The country will need “many, many years” after the war to merely gauge the damage to its forests, said Mr Strilets, who Svitlana Hrynchuk replaced as Ukraine’s environmental minister in September.
Restoration could take 70 years and cost billions of dollars.
According to Mr Strilets, the Zelensky government estimates that demining all contaminated territory, including forests and other areas, would take 70 years. According to a June 2024 study on the Ukraine war’s carbon emissions, conflict-related forest fires directly emitted greenhouse gases equivalent to 6.75 million tonnes of CO2, the equivalent of Armenia’s annual emissions.
Ukraine has also lost the carbon capture of those burnt trees.
In February, the World Bank estimated that the damage wrought by the war on forests and other protected natural areas, including marshes and wetlands, exceeded $30 billion. That included $3.3 billion of direct damage from fighting, $26.5 billion worth of wider economic and environmental costs, including pollution, and a repair bill of $2.6 billion.
Ukraine believes Russia should pay for the damage it has caused. Maksym Popov, an adviser on environmental issues to Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, told Reuters Kyiv was pursuing about 40 criminal cases against Russia over forest devastation.
- Click on Wood Central’s special feature to read more about Ukraine’s challenges in reconstructing its forests. To find out how Russia is now trading conflict timbers out of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone and selling into the Eurasian market, click here.
