Russia's war has caused about $156 billion in environmental damage to Ukraine since 2022. Of that total, nearly $90 billion covers destroyed and damaged nature protection areas, and approximately $45 billion covers polluted soils, Ukraine's Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets said on World Environment Day, 5 June.
Black Sea oil spills and Dnistrovska HPP attack
Lubinets cited specific examples behind the topline figure. Russian strikes on Ukrainian Black Sea ports have caused oil-product spills covering up to 800 square kilometers, damaging marine ecosystems on a scale that makes coastal summer life along the Black Sea unrecoverable in the near term, he said.
The Russian attack on the Dnistrovska Hydroelectric Power Plant on the Dniester River produced an oil leak that threatened drinking water supplies for hundreds of thousands of people in both Ukraine and Moldova.
"These are strikes on places where consequences are felt most deeply and longest," Lubinets said.
Russia's responsibility and open legal question
"Russia must bear full responsibility for every poisoned river and every meter of destroyed land," Lubinets said.
Ecological catastrophes of this scale have no borders, so the world has no right to get used to this reality or to perceive it as statistics, he claimed.
Ukraine has been documenting environmental damage as part of its broader war crimes case against Russia.
Over recent years, within the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Ukraine has repeatedly raised the issue of the need to recognize ecocide as a fifth international crime and to introduce the relevant amendments to the Rome Statute, the document behind the International Criminal Court, according to Yuliia Ovchynnykova, a member of the parliamentary Committee on Environmental Policy and Nature Management.
