Andrei Kurkov / Ukraine. Ecological Apocalypse now

I now know exactly what the Apocalypse looks like. Raging torrents of murky water that sweep everything living and dead before them into the abyss, killing thousands of deer and roe deer, cows and goats, tens of thousands of hedgehogs, hundreds of people.

These torrents sweep away the top layer of soil from the land and flood the cemeteries disturbing the graves of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians killed by Russian missiles and drones. On the flooded land, the water becomes deoxygenated and fish die in their thousands of tons. Then wells are flooded with this poisonous water, wells that only yesterday supplied the life source of the local population.

While I slept another night on the floor in the corridor of my Kyiv apartment, listening to the air raid warnings and the thunder of anti-air defense systems, Odesa suffered one of its worst nights of the war so far. Russian rockets and drones hit the city, but the majority of explosions were heard in the seaport, where grain was being prepared for loading onto ships. The grain terminals burned brightest of all, right beside the sea – the sea in which it is already forbidden to swim or to catch fish because of the Kakhovka Apocalypse. Only death now swims in that water.

The nights in Kyiv, Odessa, Kherson, and Mykolaiv are very similar. They are sleepless, filled with anxiety and the sounds of explosions. But, when morning comes, the fires from night’s shelling are usually already extinguished, still the fumes remain in the air and leave a bitter taste in the throat. We wonder what kind of lung disease the war-poisoned air that we breathe will provoke.

I still remember how, after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, I felt a taste of metal in my mouth for several months.

But even today, with all around, Kyiv continues to live in a pinkish bubble of ecological enlightenment – with the news of death and destruction in our ears we still sort our garbage. The plastics recycling container is next to the house. We have to walk 10 minutes to the container for glass. To recycle metal waste, we have to walk even further, but there’s bin for used batteries and LED bulbs there too. Procedures to which we became accustomed long before the war, can now seem a little absurd. And sometimes you ask yourself: what is the use of this waste sorting when the scale of the damage done by this war is so great? After all, war is, perhaps, the biggest environmental disaster of all possible!

In Ukraine, the front line is about 2,000 km long and it is not just a line. There are vast territories through which the war has crashed with millions of shells and mines, and phosphorus bombs, leaving charred forests and fields and ruined houses and factories and public buildings.

About 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory in the south and east of the country has been very badly damaged by Russia. In addition, every day Russian drones and missiles explode in different regions of Ukraine, adding even more toxic substances to the air, water and land. And I am not even talking about the human casualties, which number in the tens of thousands.

When trying to take Kyiv in late February and early March last year, the Russian army with thousands of armored vehicles and tanks drove through the territory of the Chernobyl zone. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant itself was also captured, but the level of radiation in the Chernobyl area rose sharply precisely because Russian tanks and infantry vehicles drove through the zone, and Russian soldiers dug dozens of kilometers of trenches through the radiation-poisoned earth. In these trenches, according to Serhiy Pasevish, an emergency situation specialist at the National Academy of Science, the radiation levels were ten thousand times higher than acceptable norm.

From the point of view of ecology, it can safely be said that the biggest catastrophe provoked in Ukraine by Russia is the explosion of the dam of the Kakhovka reservoir. In addition to the death of people and animals, the result of this disaster was the pollution of a large part of the Black Sea. Water from the Kakhovka reservoir reached Romania and Bulgaria. In Romania and Bulgaria, unlike in Ukraine, fishing is not prohibited. The fish caught there can end up on the tables of any family in the European Union. The poisoned Black Sea water itself could have already entered the Mediterranean Sea. This is already a catastrophe on a global scale, which, if it is mentioned in the European press at all is rather played down and described in very cautious terms.

A possible future catastrophe – the explosion of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant – gets more attention in the press, and it seems that possible radiation poisoning frightens the world much more than what has already happened to the Kakhovka Sea.

It’s no secret that Russian troops have turned the premises of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant into an ammunition depots and that they have mined the territory, turning the nuclear power plant in the south of Ukraine into a de facto time bomb. Many residents of Ukraine believe that the explosion of a nuclear power plant is only a matter of time.

The Ukrainian authorities first tried to reassure the inhabitants of Kyiv, saying that any increase in the levels of radiation due to an explosion at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant would not affect Kyiv, but then they warned all Kyivites to stock up on enough water and tinned food to last at least 3 days, and preferably for a week, so that you don’t need to go out into the street during the first days after the explosion at the nuclear power plant. We already have such a supply at home, as do our friends and neighbors. But this does not mean that we are ready for such a catastrophe.

The war, which in itself is already an ecological catastrophe, can lead to even more serious global consequences.

During the ten years that preceded the start of this war in 2014, Ukraine actively developed green tourism. As a result, the number of nature reserves in the country had grown significantly and they have become popular tourist magnets. Now many nature reserves, especially in the South and East of Ukraine, have been partially or completely destroyed. Reserves located in the Black Sea region can no longer receive visitors and tourists due to frequent shelling.

Even in regions remote from the front line, it is difficult to maintain conservation activities within the nature reserves because of funding problems.

Increasingly, there are conflicts between employees of the nature reserves and the Ukrainian military. Recently, such a conflict arose in the Tuzlovsky Limany nature reserve near Odesa.

The estuaries have been dammed up by the military and separated from the sea, the water in them is slowly “turning sour”. The existence of many species inhabiting the nature reserve is under threat. The reserve’s staff have tried to create channels for the sea water to enter the area, but the military have forbidden them to do this.

In times of war, security issues take priority. Nature can wait. And nature is waiting. Nature is waiting to be cleared of mines and military metal, of millions of tons of construction debris left in the place of cities, villages and factories destroyed by rockets and shells. Nature will have to wait a very long time. After all, even in order for a new forest to grow on the site of those destroyed by fires, it will take 20-30 years.

Dozens of international criminologists and lawyers have been working in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, documenting Russian war crimes. The number of recorded war crimes is already approaching 100,000. Environmental specialists work beside the criminologists documenting Putin’s environmental crimes and calculating the cost of damage. There are already more than 2,200 such recorded crimes against nature, and their number is growing every day.

Andrei Kurkov born 23 April 1961 near Leningrad, grew up and lives in Kyiv. He is a Ukrainian novelist who writes in Russian and Ukrainian. He is the author of more than 20 novels and 10 books for children. His work is currently translated into 42 languages, including English, Japanese, French, Chinese, Swedish and Hebrew. He has also written assorted articles for various publications worldwide including New York Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman, La Liberation, Le Monde, Die Welt, Die Zeit.

From 2018 till 2022 he was acting President of PEN Ukraine, running international and national literary and socio-political projects.

For his novels, for literary and human rights activities he was awarded Halldor Laxness Prize (Iceland, 2022), “Legion d’Honeur” (France 2015), Medici Prize for Best foreign Novel (France 2022), “Freedom of Expression Award” (Index on Censorship, London 2022), “Readers’ Award” (France, 2012), Hans and Sophie Scholl Prize (Germany, 2022), National Critic Circle Award (USA, 2023) and others.

His books are full of black humour, they are mostly set in post-Soviet reality.

We give thanks to the Fritt Ord-foundation for the support.