Ecocide in Ukraine
The Environmental Cost of Russia's War

Darya Tsymbalyuk (Author)

9781509562503, Polity Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 March 2025

188 pages
21.1 x 13.5 x 1 cm, 0.204 kg

"Darya Tsymbalyuk's is a powerful voice that speaks not only on behalf of millions of Ukrainians whose life was turned upside down by the Russian aggression against their homeland but also on behalf of the nature that has been destroyed by the war. A personal and powerful testimony on the destruction that still goes on."
Serhii Plokhy, author of Chernobyl Roulette: A War Story

"Timely, necessary, galvanizing, enraging."
Philippe Sands, UCL

"A gripping lament over the destruction that Russia has sowed into every nook of Ukraine's natural environment. A must-read!"
Maria Popova, McGill University

"A supremely important book, in which all Ukrainians will recognize their disappearing landscape and the resilience of communities surviving the immense devastation and terror. Many have tried to write such a book, but only Tsymbalyuk has succeeded."
Svitlana Matviyenko, Simon Fraser University

"A moving and beautifully written account of a country and its nature enduring war. At once analytical and deeply personal, it offers a unique window on to what is happening to the environment, society and culture in Ukraine."
Emma Hakala, Finnish Institute of International Affairs

"Deeply personal and grounded in evidence, Tsymbalyuk's book is an elegy for what is lost in Ukraine to the violence of war. It documents the destruction of human and natural systems and provides insight into potential long-term consequences of military conflict."
Lisa Brady, Boise State University

"Part memoir, part academic study, Ecocide in Ukraine is a marvellous and moving account of the massive destruction caused to the natural world by Russia's war. Darya Tsymbalyuk describes what has been lost. Fighting has wrecked the habits of unique flora and fauna, from rare mice to endangered flowers. An important and original account."
Luke Harding, author of Invasion: Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and Peterson Literary Prize

"Tsymbalyuk blends personal insight with scholarly rigor, giving the book an understated yet powerful emotional resonance."
The Kyiv Independent

"[The book] is a powerful meditation on the fragility of life – human and other-than-human – amid ecological and epistemic devastation of our surrounding world. Moving between scholarship, storytelling, and environmental witnessing, Tsymbalyuk shows how war reshapes both ecosystems and the ways we know them. At a moment when academia seeks to grasp the mutual vulnerability of nature, culture, and knowledge, her work speaks urgently to a broader public reckoning with ecological loss and resilience. We could not have imagined a more fitting winner of this year's Kovaliv Prize in Nonfiction/History."
Oleh Kotsyuba, jury chair, UNWLA

"Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia's War, the brilliant work by Darya Tsymbalyuk, tells of the horrific ecological consequences of Russia's war in Ukraine. Moving through the key themes that shape the narrative – water, land (zemlya), air, plants, bodies, and energy – the author reveals the murderous scale of the ecocide. The poetic quality of her style and the captivating stories of Ukraine's natural world (did you know, for example, that the steppe may contain even greater biodiversity than tropical forests?) intertwine with the merciless reality of facts. These facts testify to the toxicity and destructiveness of war for an immense number of life forms – those living in the soil, on the ground, in the air, and in the water – as well as for local knowledge and the war-altered semiosis, where the sky becomes a threat, burrowing into the ground a form of protection, and a happy future is imagined as the chance to gather a new harvest of ripe, fragrant tomatoes under a gentle sun in one's own garden."
Maria Mayerchyk, UNWLA

"Dariia Tsymbaliuk's book is a discovery of sorts of eco-studies as an interdisciplinary field where scholarship and essayistic writing, diary and autobiography, law and a biological herbarium come together. This nonhierarchical writing is itself part of ecology, because it shows how polymorphic and multistylistic ecological thinking is. The writing itself—like everything Tsymbaliuk says about animate and inanimate nature, about the environment, and about people who are part of that very environment—becomes a document and a testimony of the war."
Tamara Hundorova, UNWLA

"Emotional and rigorous, highly personal and carefully researched"
Ecozon@

"It is probably our best possible current understanding of the ongoing violence and devastation in Ukraine, which is ultimately senseless. Thus, this beautifully written and poignant book helps us to understand enough not to be paralyzed by horror, not to distance ourselves, but to continue to care, document and get involved."
Baltic Worlds

"Tsymbalyuk's book is smart, compassionate, and captivating. A great reading for an undergraduate class, it will also serve as the foundation for any further exploration of the environmental history of the Russian-Ukrainian War."
Environmental History

Winner of the 2025 Kovaliv Prize in Nonfiction/History
Winner of the Arizona State University Humanities Institute 2026 Book Award
Winner of the American Association for Ukranian Studies Book Prize

Russia's war on Ukraine has not only destroyed millions of human lives, it has also been catastrophic for the environment. Forests and fields have been burned to the ground, animal and plant species pushed to the brink of extinction, soil and water contaminated with oil products, debris, and mines. On a single day in June 2023, the breached Kakhovka Dam flooded thousands of kilometres of protected natural habitat, as well as villages, towns, and agricultural land. The devastation of biodiversity and ecosystems across Ukraine has been immeasurable, long-lasting and its consequences stretch beyond national borders.

In this poignant book, Ukrainian researcher Darya Tsymbalyuk offers an intimate portrait of her beloved homeland against the backdrop of Russia's war and ecocide. In elegant and moving prose, she describes the damage to the country's rivers, the grasslands of the steppes, animals, insects, and colonies of birds, as a result of Russia's ground and air operations. Alongside the everyday experiences of people in Ukraine living with the environmental consequences of the war, we share Tsymbalyuk's own reckoning with the changing nature of cherished places and the loss of familiar worlds caused by the ongoing Russian invasion.

Acknowledgements
Notes on Transliteration
Preface
Chronology
Map

1.   Water
2.   Zemlia
3.   Air
4.   Plants
5.   Bodies
6.   Energy

Notes

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP]