Ukrainian and Latvian foresters have planted a memorial “Forest of Memory” at Holoby in the Volyn region to honour Kovel Forestry engineer Bohdan Kostyuchyk, killed by Russian shelling in 2023, and every Ukrainian ranger lost on active duty since Russia’s full-scale invasion began. That is according to Roman Romanyuk, head of the Volyn Oblast Military Administration, who announced the ceremony on the administration’s Telegram channel.
Ukrainian rangers and Deputy Foreign Minister Oleksandr Mishchenko led the Ukrainian side, joined by Latvian foresters and volunteers who had travelled across the border for the ceremony. Across the Kovel district site, the team planted pine and oak, setting a single viburnum and a linden beside the main stand to represent Ukraine and Latvia, respectively.
Kostyuchyk was killed on 28 June 2023 during Russian shelling, and the memorial extends in his name to every Ukrainian forester who has since died in the line of duty: “Next week, a similar Forest of Memory will appear in Latvia,” Romanyuk said, with Volyn rangers set to travel across the border to plant the mirrored woodland alongside their Latvian colleagues.
To date, more than three million hectares of Ukrainian forest have been damaged by combat since February 2022, according to Svitlana Hrynchuk, Ukraine’s Minister for Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, with unexploded ordnance now covering roughly one-third of the country’s forests and farmland and the environmental damage bill exceeding US $40 billion.
Satellite imagery by Viktor Myroniuk of the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, in collaboration with USDA Forest Service and Oregon State University researchers, has mapped forest loss across the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone and the Kharkiv and Luhansk oblasts, where fighting has been heaviest.
Despite the damage, Ukraine passed a symbolic replanting milestone last November when, as Wood Central reported, military forester Oleksandr Kotseruba planted the country’s billionth tree at Kyiv’s Main Military Hospital to complete President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s three-year “Green Country” initiative, with Volyn among the top replanting regions alongside Zhytomyr, Rivne, Lviv and Chernihiv.
