Abstract
The environmental impacts of the Russia–Ukraine war have generated considerable attention, and legal and policy developments occurring both within Ukraine and at the international level can contribute to forging a new justice architecture that addresses the traditional neglect of more-than-human worlds in transitional justice processes. While acknowledging the importance of these developments, this interdisciplinary article argues that they do not go far enough because they frame more-than-human worlds solely as victims and neglect their agency. Using the Russia–Ukraine war as a case study and drawing on original empirical data, this article introduces three ideas for developing transitional justice that are attentive to more-than-human worlds in the sense of respecting their agency. The first is acknowledging some of the ways that they have ‘helped’ in the war. The second is paying attention to how they are responding to the harms they have suffered. The third is listening to them.
A livable world also requires making ontological room for beings that do not fit one's cast of characters. (Haraway, 2018: 105)
Introduction
On 5 November 2021, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly declared 6 November each year as marking the International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict (UN General Assembly, 2021). In so doing, it highlighted a fundamental conflict-environment nexus that is now widely acknowledged (see, e.g. Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, 2023; UN Environment Programme [UNEP], 2019). In contrast, this nexus is downplayed within transitional justice, a field that remains deeply anthropocentric (Clark, 2024; Killean and Newton, 2025; Viaene et al., 2023) and reflects ‘all kinds of species boundaries and exclusions’ (Ihar, 2022: 209).
There are some exceptions in this regard. More particularly, there is important scholarship that explicitly calls on transitional justice to address the myriad harms that different ‘worlds of life’ (Van Dooren and Rose, 2016: 80) – including animals, steppes, forests and rivers – suffer in situations of war, armed conflict and societal upheaval (see, e.g. Bradley, 2017; Killean and Dempster, 2025; Ordóñez-Vargas et al., 2023). This interdisciplinary article builds on this scholarship but also develops it in new directions, thereby making an original conceptual and empirical contribution to the field of transitional justice and to socio-legal studies more broadly. It argues that focusing only or primarily on harms is just one part – albeit a crucial and essential part – of challenging the field's anthropocentrism and expanding its boundaries; and it seeks to evidence this through a specific focus on the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war.
There is growing research analysing how Russian aggression against its neighbour has harmed, inter alia, Ukrainian fauna (Tsymbalyuk, 2025), forests (Cazzolla Gatti et al., 2025) and soil (Filho et al., 2024). Even more significantly, there have been some major legal and policy-related developments linked to the war and its environmental impacts. The Office of the Prosecutor-General of Ukraine, for example, has registered more than 200 cases of environmental war crimes. According to an advisor to the Prosecutor-General, ‘There is no precedent for any state or actor trying to punish individuals for wartime environmental damage, so we believe that Ukraine is pioneering this new direction’ (interview, 16 December 2024). Some of these cases, moreover, are being investigated as ecocide, a crime that cannot currently be prosecuted in international criminal law (Minkova, 2023) but is included in Ukraine's Criminal Code (Kostin, 2024). Also noteworthy is the creation, in 2023, of a Register of Damage Caused by the Aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, as a first step in a larger multi-state effort to establish a future international compensation mechanism. Eligible claims that may be submitted to the Register include damage to the environment and natural resources (Council of Europe, 2024).
Notwithstanding the importance of these developments, they can only take us so far. In her superb book Matters of Care, Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 13) poses the question: ‘What does caring mean when we go about thinking and living interdependently with beings other than human, in “more than human” worlds?’ Thinking about this in relation to transitional justice, the crucial point is that caring does not mean narrowly framing ‘nature’ only or primarily as a victim. To do so neglects the ‘liveliness’ (Van Dooren and Rose, 2016) of more-than-human worlds – a term used in this article to denote assemblages of ‘relations and entanglements between humans and non-human actors’ (Ullrich and Trump, 2023: 35). By extension, it also contributes to reinforcing human/nature binaries that feed ideas of human exceptionalism. The central aim of this research, therefore, is to demonstrate – using the Russia–Ukraine war as a case study – the pivotal importance of acknowledging not just harms done to more-than-human worlds in situations of war and armed conflict, but also, fundamentally, their agency.
To be clear from the outset, the concept of agency as discussed in this research is not about intention or purpose. It is about relationality and interdependence – and the fact that humans are ‘never outside of a sticky web of connections or an ecology’ (Bennett, 2004: 365). Grounded in new materialism (Barad, 2007), post-humanism (Braidotti, 2013) and Indigenous cosmologies (Wright et al., 2012) – all of which are under-explored within transitional justice – it is a framing of agency, thus, that resonates with growing cross-disciplinary research on other-than-human forms of agency, including ‘planty agencies’ (Brice, 2014: 944; see also Kimmerer, 2013; Marder, 2013).
This article maps out and examines, conceptually and practically, three particular ideas for developing expanded and more inclusive approaches to transitional justice that acknowledge multiple and entangled agencies. The first is recognising that more-than-human worlds have, in various ways, ‘helped’ in the Russia–Ukraine war and contributed to positively shaping developments on the ground. The second is paying attention to how more-than-human worlds are responding to and dealing with the harms that they have suffered. The third is listening to more-than-human worlds and to the information that they communicate through sound.
A potential criticism of the article might be that its arguments detract from human experiences in situations of war and armed conflict – and stretch the parameters of transitional justice in a way that makes these experiences less important. Yet such a criticism would be ill founded because human experiences cannot be artificially separated from the multiply interwoven worlds within which they are embedded. Ultimately, therefore, what the article is presenting is a way of thinking about transitional justice as a process that is necessarily embedded within these imbricated worlds.
Methodology and Article Structure
The article draws on empirical data from a research project focused on the environmental impacts of the Russia–Ukraine war and their significance for transitional justice. 1 A total of 32 Ukrainians and one Russian participated in the project. Of these, the largest number were scientists, including botanists, ornithologists, herpetologists and a marine biologist. A smaller number were Ukrainians without specific environmental expertise, including an English teacher and a former soldier in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and two of the interviewees were lawyers. The rationale for this mixed sample was to explore a variety of different perspectives and experiences regarding the war's environmental consequences – and different viewpoints on transitional justice.
The project methodology consisted of two parts. First, I conducted semi-structured interviews with research participants via Zoom (and in one case via email). There were common questions that all interviewees were asked, but the scientists and lawyers were also asked some more specialist questions. It is fully acknowledged that the use of semi-structured interviews to examine such a vast and complex issue as the environmental impacts of war has some limitations. The purpose of the interviews, however, was broader than just discussing these impacts, and the data constitute valuable and original empirical material that both enriches this article and adds something new to existing research on the war's environmental aspects. Interviews typically lasted between one hour and one-and-a-half hours, and I conducted the majority of them in English. A Ukrainian scholar acted as an interpreter in a small number of cases. The interviews were recorded, with the interviewees’ informed consent; and after checking and editing the Zoom-generated transcripts, I uploaded them into NVivo and coded them, using mainly open/inductive coding. All of the data are securely stored on the servers of the host institution in the UK.
Second, participants were asked to make two recordings of their local soundscapes (sound environments) using their mobile phones. They uploaded their recordings onto a secure website created by the host institution; and during the interviews, I asked them some questions about their recordings – and about some of the ways that their soundscapes have changed since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. There exists substantial research on soundscape ecology (see, e.g. Farina, 2014; Krause, 2015), which Pijanowski et al. (2011: 204) define as ‘all sounds, those of biophony [biological sounds], geophony [geophysical sounds], and anthrophony [human-generated sounds], emanating from a given landscape to create unique acoustical patterns across a variety of spatial and temporal scales’. Soundscape ecology, however, remains overlooked in conflict contexts, and one of the aims of the project was precisely to address this gap. Specifically, I wanted to find out what insights into the war's environmental consequences could be gained from focusing on sound and asking interviewees to record some of the sounds around them. The soundscape recordings – which I extensively discuss and analyse in a recently published article (Clark, 2025) – are also significant as acoustic expressions of entangled more-than-human worlds and of the intertwined agencies operating within these worlds. Both the recordings and some accompanying text from the interviews are now fully accessible to other researchers in the form of an online exhibition, which is available in both English and Ukrainian, 2 and they will be archived in the British Library when the project ends.
The article begins by giving an overview of some of the environmental impacts of the Russia–Ukraine war to date. It does not and cannot cover all of them. Focusing on the main themes and issues that interviewees talked about, it complements and triangulates the interview data by drawing on a variety of secondary literature, as well as media and policy sources. Important in its own right, this section also provides crucial context for the article's following section, which outlines some key developments taking place within Ukraine and internationally in response to some of ways that the Russia–Ukraine war has affected and damaged myriad ecosystems and habitats. The remaining three sections take forward and build the article's core argument that addressing the marginalisation of more-than-human worlds requires acknowledging not just the harms done to them, but, also, their agency.
The Impacts of the Russia–Ukraine War on More-Than-Human Worlds
When asked about the war's environmental impacts, interviewees frequently stressed some of the many ways that it has harmed and impacted animals (see, e.g. Holmberg, 2025; Russell et al., 2024; Tsymbalyuk, 2025) – although everything discussed in this section has necessarily affected fauna. The construction of trenches, dugouts and military fences, for example, has greatly altered the landscape. These fortifications effect metabolic breaks within the environment, disrupt ecological connectivity and sometimes result in animals being trapped or trampled (Kirilyuk, 2023; Marushchak et al., 2024: 120). Large swathes of Ukrainian territory are also now saturated with landmines (UN Development Programme [UNDP], 2024a), which present a substantial threat to large animals. An interviewee working in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in northern Ukraine recounted how a Przewalski's horse 3 was killed in May 2024 when it stepped on a landmine (see also Rybalska, 2024). ‘There was a huge explosion’, he explained, ‘and a Ukrainian drone captured what happened. You can imagine how dangerous landmines are for such big animals that have enough weight to activate the mines’ (interview, 31 January 2025).
One of the biggest losses of animals occurred in June 2023 when Russian forces targeted the Kakhovka dam (Vyshnevskyi et al., 2023), ‘a linchpin of a colossal hydraulic system encompassing a water reservoir (2155 km2) and a network of irrigation channels spanning Southern Ukraine’ (Truth Hounds and Project Expedite Justice, 2024: 9). When the dam, situated in Kherson region, was destroyed, water from the reservoir rapidly surged downstream, causing widespread flooding of local areas and killing domestic animals and livestock (Truth Hounds and Project Expedite Justice, 2024: 111). Additionally, due to the velocity of the water and its contamination with surface runoff, oil, chemicals and unexploded ordnance (UXO), there was ‘rapid habitat destruction and mass die-off of numerous wildlife (plant, fungi and animal) species’ (UNEP, 2023: 56). As one interviewee recounted, ‘I was in this place after the catastrophe. There were dead fish everywhere and you can’t help because there is just death’ (interview, 27 September 2024). The destruction of the dam and the movement downstream of vast quantities of fresh water also altered salinity levels in the Black Sea, affecting some marine life (Stone, 2024: 21–22); and many freshwater species that were not well adapted to salty water died after being washed into the sea (Marushchak et al., 2024: 124). The consequences upstream, due to the desiccation of the reservoir, were similarly far-reaching (UNEP, 2023: 57–53).
Relatedly, the war – which began in eastern Ukraine in 2014 – has disturbed or destroyed many habitats. Prior to the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, for example, Russia conducted naval exercises in both the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea,
4
and these can be very detrimental to animals (Sadogurska, 2023). It is well documented that sonic pollution of the sea, including sonar and explosions, can seriously harm marine life – and in particular cetaceans, such as dolphins (Parsons et al., 2008; Węgrzyn et al., 2023). Oil spills have also had huge impacts on marine ecosystems (Morris and Helfaya, 2024); and a recent report by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre underlines that the war's long-term consequences for the biodiversity and health of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov ‘may include secondary pollution events, changes in mobility and bioavailability of contaminants and lasting changes in habitat availability and quality’ (Belis et al., 2025: 67). Additionally, the opening of the Kerch Bridge in 2018 – built by Russia to create a direct land connection to Crimea, which it illegally annexed in 2014 – has led to increased military tension between Russia and Ukraine in the Sea of Azov. Furthermore, the construction of the bridge narrowed the Kerch Strait, thereby having a considerable impact on Tuzla Island in the middle of the Strait. As the marine biologist who participated in this research explained: Tuzla Island has a lot of unique wetlands and habitats, and it was almost completely destroyed. The Kerch Bridge goes through the island, and this huge construction [which Ukrainian forces have attacked several times] impacted the migratory routes of some marine mammals, as well as some fish species, and polluted the water (interview, 14 January 2025; see also Vasyliuk, 2023).
The war has indirectly affected forests by exacerbating the issue of illegal logging (Peter and Hunder, 2024). On this point, one interviewee stressed that ‘The people involved in illegal logging are mostly foresters, mostly people who are supposed to save our forests. And it's really interesting that sometimes these illegal loggers have all of the necessary legal documents’ (interview, 3 October 2024). Indeed, it appears that some officials have made logging much easier from a legal perspective. In 2022, elected deputies ‘changed the law to end seasonal bans on logging in protected and other forests between April 1 to June 15, when many species reproduce’ (Hrynyk, 2022). This change in the law thus overturned the so-called ‘season of silence’. 5
The biggest direct cause of war-related forest loss, however, is fire (Cazzolla Gatti et al., 2025; Zibtsev et al., 2024). According to satellite data, for example, there were a total of 208 fires in the Ivory Coast of Sviatoslav National Nature Park in Mykolaiv region in 2022–2023, affecting 6,300 hectares of land (Hubareva, 2024a); and 92,100 hectares of forests burned in 2024 (Gayle, 2025). Many fires result from combat operations (shelling, explosions, aerial bombardment) and UXO contamination. Some are started deliberately. In both cases, there are many consequences, including air pollution (Malytska et al., 2024) and damage to soil, which forests help to protect (Matsala et al., 2024). Fires destroy the humus horizon (top layer) of soil, consisting of organic substances that are crucial for ensuring soil fertility and moisture (Moroz, 2024: 52); and the accumulation of ash, resulting from the burning of biomass, changes the biological and chemical properties of the soil (Cazzolla Gatti et al., 2025). A variety of factors, moreover, have often made it very difficult to deal with these fires. Matsala et al. (2024) point out in this regard that ‘Their impact has been particularly severe as fire suppression operations have been challenging due to fires happening largely in isolated rural areas, ongoing battles and UXO contamination’. Additionally, Russian aggressors have sometimes actively prohibited or obstructed Ukrainian fire-fighting efforts (interview, 20 September 2024; see also Cazzolla Gatti et al., 2025; Vasyliuk et al., 2024).
Fires have additionally affected fragile steppe ecosystems (and some forests exist within steppe zones). One interviewee explained that the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, situated on the Dnipro River, has contributed to increased fires – further compounded by the effects of military occupation – around Askania-Nova, Ukraine's oldest nature reserve. Located on the left bank of the Dnipro River, Askania-Nova has been under Russian occupation since the start of the full-scale invasion, and according to the interviewee: The destruction of the Kakhovka dam and the massive flooding that resulted from it [see, e.g., Vyshnevskyi et al., 2023] have had indirect consequences for Askania-Nova due to rapid and massive hydrological changes [see, e.g., UNDP, 2024b] in the territory on which a lot of agricultural complexes depend, including the functioning of Askania-Nova. For example, we have mass occurrences of fires in the agricultural complexes around Askania-Nova. There are a lot of them in this region because of lack of water and also, relatedly, because of inappropriate monitoring of such fires and inappropriate management of these areas. (interview, 22 November 2024)
The war has also contributed to the pollution of rivers (Litynska and Pelekhata, 2024). Concerns were raised in August 2024, for example, after large numbers of fish began to die in the Seym River and subsequently also in the Desna River (WWF Mediterranean, 2024), of which the Seym is a tributary. As one interviewee highlighted, there were mass die-offs of fish and molluscs due to critically low oxygen levels (interview, 27 September 2024; see also Hubareva, 2024b). Ukrainian officials have alleged that large amounts of chemical waste from a Russian factory in the Kursk region were deliberately dumped into the Seym River (Denisova, 2024). While this remains unproven, it is noteworthy that in August 2024, Ukrainian forces launched an incursion into the Kursk region of Russia – through which the Seym River flows – and the area has continued to experience fighting (Mackintosh, 2025).
Moreover, the war has severely impacted Ukraine's largest river, the Dnipro. When the Kakhovka dam was destroyed, for example, ‘more than 450 tons of fuel and engine oil were released into the Dnipro River’ (Hapich et al., 2024); and water samples taken from the river and related water systems, such as the Dnipro-Bug Estuary, have revealed high levels of heavy metals (Jiang et al., 2025). These metals, which are not degradable, can enter the food chain (Vasyliuk, 2025) and threaten local ecosystems (Shumilova et al., 2025).
In providing an overview of some of the war's extensive environmental impacts, this section has sought to make salient the limitations of deeply anthropocentric approaches to transitional justice that crucially marginalise and neglect the harms done to more-than-human worlds in situations of war and armed conflict. It is highly significant, therefore, that there have been some recent developments – within Ukraine and internationally – that can contribute to building a more inclusive justice and transitional justice architecture.
Developments in Dealing With the War's Environmental Impacts
Throughout history, war and armed conflict have taken a huge toll on diverse lifeworlds. Examples include the destruction of forests due to use of the chemical defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War (Falk, 1973); the mass killing of elephants (for their lucrative ivory) during Angola's civil war (Chase and Griffin, 2011); and the draining of the southern Mesopotamia marshes in Iraq during the 1990s, as a punitive strategy against the Marsh Arabs following the Iran-Iraq War (Ahram, 2015). As Leebaw (2014: 770) remarks, ‘Environmental devastation is not only a by-product of war and militarism, but has also been implemented as a military strategy since ancient times’. Viewed within this larger historical context, Ukraine is not an exceptional case study. What does make it extremely important, however, is the attention that is being given to the war's environmental impacts.
At a G20 meeting in Indonesia in November 2022, for example, President Zelensky put forward his 10-point peace plan, point 8 of which deals with environmental protection and prevention of ecocide (President of Ukraine, 2022). The following year, in June 2023, the Office of the President of Ukraine established a High-Level International Working Group on the Environmental Consequences of War. Co-chaired by the Swedish politician Margot Wallström and the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, the Working Group has developed ‘An Environmental Compact for Ukraine’. This 26-page document, published in 2024, sets out three key priorities, which directly map onto the aforementioned point 8 in President Zelensky's peace plan. The first priority is monitoring the damage done to the environment and reducing the risks to it; and one of the recommendations is that ‘Ukraine and its neighbors should give special attention to the environmental damage affecting the Black Sea’ (High-Level Working Group, 2024: 6). This is important because legal questions regarding the impacts of war on marine environments have been largely neglected, and ‘international law in this area has long been recognised as inadequate and outdated’ (Graham, 2024: 769). The second priority is ensuring accountability; and the document notes in this regard that international experience with respect to prosecuting environmental crimes in conflict contexts ‘remains underdeveloped’ (High-Level Working Group, 2024: 8). The third priority, linked to the larger concept of ‘building back greener’, is mobilising green reconstruction – such as reconstruction that meets climate targets – and environmental recovery (High-Level Working Group, 2024: 9).
The Environmental Compact is an ambitious document; it makes a total of 50 recommendations. It is also a comprehensive and unprecedented document that offers a useful roadmap. According to Andriy Yermak, it has never previously happened that ‘a country at war not only thinks, but works to restore the environment, punish the guilty and also show the whole world what…can and should be done to ensure the future for the next generations’ (in President of Ukraine, 2024).
Specifically with respect to ensuring accountability, crucial work is taking place within the Office of the Prosecutor-General of Ukraine. This has a Specialised Environmental Prosecutor's Office, with prosecutors who are working exclusively on environmental cases; and as the European Union Advisory Mission Ukraine (EUAM, 2023) has emphasised, Ukraine is spearheading the prosecution of environmental crimes. An advisor to the Prosecutor-General explained, for example, that 246 cases (involving 403 incidents) have been registered thus far as environmental war crimes. Of these, 11 have the additional qualification of ecocide (interview, 16 December 2024; updated figures provided in subsequent email correpondence, 9 July 2025), a crime that is punishable by a prison term of between eight and 15 years and is defined in Article 441 of Ukraine's Criminal Code as the ‘mass destruction of flora and fauna, poisoning of air or water resources, and also any other actions that may cause an environmental disaster’ (Kostin, 2024). 6 One of the potential ecocide cases is the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June 2023, although investigations regarding the environmental consequences of the dam's collapse are ongoing.
Another case, and one that is further advanced, is the Neutron Source case. The Neutron Source research facility, located in the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology in north-eastern Ukraine, stores nuclear materials, and Russian forces attacked the facility with various types of weapons – including aerial bombs and rockets – in 2022 (Kostin, 2024). According to the advisor to the Prosecutor-General, ‘We have documented more than 70 attacks on this facility’. The attacks were fortunately unsuccessful, in the sense that the projectiles did not reach the nuclear materials. He went on to explain, however, that ‘Taking into account the fact that the ecocide article in our Criminal Code refers to any actions that may lead to environmental disaster, we have framed the case to show that had these attacks been successful, they could have led to environmental disaster’ (interview, 16 December 2024). Five senior Russian commanders have been charged in absentia for these attacks (Larin, 2025).
It is helpful to view these developments in the larger context of international criminal law, which ‘in its totality remains an anthropocentric regime, putting the human being in the center of its protection’ (Bustami and Hecken, 2021: 155). For example, there is only one article in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) that expressly addresses individual criminal responsibility for attacks committed against the environment (as war crimes). Article 8(2)(b)(iv) refers to: Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated. (Rome Statute of the ICC, 1998)
With respect to the crime of ecocide, Ukrainian prosecutors are pursuing a dual strategy of first seeking to prove violations of international humanitarian law – and specifically Articles 35 and 55 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. Given that these articles also refer to damage that is ‘long-term, widespread and severe’, 7 criminal trials in Ukraine can be expected to generate some useful jurisprudence regarding the meaning of these terms. Directly related to this point, one of the lawyers who participated in this research stressed that ‘Ukraine aims to be more active in the international arena in the sense of protecting the environment, applying international law and developing it’ (interview, 10 October 2024). The work being done by Ukrainian prosecutors, moreover, is hugely important at a time when there is growing momentum to create an international crime of ecocide (as a fifth crime in the Rome Statute) (see, e.g. Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, 2023: para. 7; Stop Ecocide International, 2025; UN Security Council, 2024: para. 45). Jojo Mehta, the co-founder of Stop Ecocide International, for example, has emphasised that when Ukraine described the destruction of the Kakhovka dam as ecocide, this had ‘a huge momentum-gathering force’ and ‘brought in that whole aspect that people perhaps had not been focusing on so much’ (in Ackermann, 2024).
Turning to the issue of reparations for environmental harms (see, e.g. Killean, 2022; Killean and Newton, 2025), a notable development has occurred as a direct result of the Russia–Ukraine war. In 2023, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe resolved to establish – in response to UN General Assembly resolution ES-11/5 (November 2022) 8 and for an initial period of three years – an Enlarged Partial Agreement on the Register of Damage Caused by the Aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. A total of 43 States and the European Union have thus far joined the Register, which has its seat in The Hague and a satellite office in Kyiv. Its role is purely to receive and process compensation claims – and the evidence relating to those claims – for damage, loss and injury on or after 24 February 2022 caused by Russia's aggression against Ukraine. The Register does not evaluate or assess the claims, attach a monetary value to them or order payments. As its website underlines, ‘These functions will belong to a future international compensation mechanism yet to be established’ (Council of Europe, n.d.).
Natural persons, the State of Ukraine and other legal entities are eligible to submit claims to the Register. For the purposes of this article, a pivotal point is that the State of Ukraine can submit claims for ‘Damage to environment and natural resources’ – a category (B3) which is sub-divided into environmental damage (B3.1) and depletion or damage of natural resources (B3.2) – as well as ‘Demining and clearing of unexploded ordnance’ (category B5) (Council of Europe, 2024). The Register – which opened for claims in April 2024 and received 1000 in its first week (Delegation of the European Union to the Council of Europe, 2024) – expects to receive between 6 million and 8 million claims (across all eligible categories) and up to 10 million, making it ‘the largest of any comparable reparation mechanism’ (Council of Europe, n.d.).
While the establishment of the Register is merely the first stage in the long process of creating an international compensation commission – work on which has already begun (Council of Europe, 2025) – the fact that there is the possibility to redress some of the many harms done to more-than-human worlds during the Russia–Ukraine war represents a large step forward. In this way, the Register and the future commission, as well as the work of Ukrainian prosecutors, can be conceptualised as contributing to a new justice framework that acknowledges and responds to, rather than overlooks, the environmental impacts of war.
Despite the importance of the above developments, they are not sufficient by themselves. The core reason for this is that they overwhelmingly frame ‘nature’ as a victim of war, just as transitional justice scholars who openly challenge the field's anthropocentricity strongly accentuate the thematic of harms. This article's objective is not to downplay or to minimise these harms. Its aim, rather, is to accentuate that focusing primarily on what has been done to more-than-human worlds militates against the possibilities of doing justice with them as opposed to simply for them; and this, in turn, can contribute to reinforcing problematic human/nature binaries and hierarchies. Overcoming these binaries and hierarchies therefore necessitates much more relational thinking about justice (see, e.g. Celermajer and Otjen, 2024; Tschakert et al., 2021). Viewed in this way, the war's environmental impacts are greatly significant in making salient different types of harms that transitional justice has thus far largely neglected. Yet more than this, they are crucially important for the purpose of ‘thickening’ discussions about more-than-human worlds in the context of transitional justice and international criminal law more broadly. What the article's final three sections underscore in this regard is the imperative of developing attentiveness to more-than-human worlds, and more particularly ‘attentive interactions with them’ (Van Dooren et al., 2016: 6) that acknowledge and respect their own agency – itself a relational concept (see, e.g. Bennett, 2010: 21). In the words of the Anishinaabe ethnobotanist Geniusz (2015: 15), ‘Humans are not at the top of the order of creation. Humans are not the lords of this earth’. It is essential to stress that the following discussion constitutes an assemblage of exploratory ideas, expressly framed as a complement (and not an alternative) to criminal prosecutions, that are primarily intended to illustrate the potential scope and application of thinking creatively about, and with, more-than-human worlds.
Acknowledging the Contribution of More-Than-Human Worlds
Scholars have written about some of the many ways that animals have participated in war, including as weapons (Lockwood, 2012) and guards (Tindol, 2013). In Ukraine, animals have been used, inter alia, as resources for political communication (Holmberg and Zepeda, 2025) and to help war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (Smahina, 2023). The important point, as Cudworth and Hobden (2015: 517) underline, is that animals ‘have been lively matter in the institutions and practices of warfare’. Relatedly, thus, they also shape and structure experiences of war (Holmberg, 2025; White, 2019), and some of the soundscape recordings from Ukraine are illustrative in this respect.
One interviewee, for example, shared a recording that she had made in a meadow in Kyiv region during a late summer's evening in 2024. Discussing the recording, the interviewee, an environmental journalist, reflected on how animals have contributed to shaping her soundscape since the start of the full-scale invasion. In her own words: When I made this recording, there was a gentle breeze and I was standing outside with my boyfriend. We were looking up at the sky, looking at our dog playing…You can hear a fox barking. This is a sound that I rarely heard before the war. Now, because of the war, hunting is banned in Ukraine and there are more wild animals. For me, hearing them is one of the positive ways in which my soundscape has changed. (interview, 6 February 2025)
There were also some implicit examples of these assemblages in the interview data. Two particularly stand out. First, just as muddy conditions hampered soldiers during the First and Second World Wars (see, e.g. Gregory, 2016; Radey and Sharp, 2015), a small number of interviewees emphasised that mud, in both its seasonal and permanent variants (such as that which exists in swamps and other wetlands), has frequently hindered Russian aggressors in Ukraine (see Hambling, 2022). One interviewee had researched this issue and compiled a database of 180 different locations in which Russian tanks and vehicles have been stranded in mud, as well as rivers (interview, 18 February 2025). Another interviewee spoke about the importance of swamps in northern Ukraine, such as those in the Polissia region which borders Belarus. ‘There are many swamps’, she explained, ‘and it is extremely difficult to cross them, which makes these ecosystems a powerful natural buffer’ (interview, 13 February 2025). At the start of the full-scale invasion, for example, when Russian soldiers entered Ukraine from Belarus (as well as from Russia and Crimea), some of them very literally became ‘bogged down’. Such difficult conditions, moreover, may have played a role in deterring Russia from launching another attack from Belarus (Hunder, 2023). The contribution of beavers to these inhospitable landscapes has also been noted; they are ecosystem engineers that further enhance the swampy conditions by building dams and increasing water storage (Barnes, 2023; Hunder, 2023).
Mud may not immediately spring to mind when thinking about agency. Yet as Cole and Sommerville (2022: 193) underscore, its ‘rich substance…is itself a world’ that is ‘full of life and animation’; and its many different effects in war evidence this (see Wood, 2006). As a composite of rain, soil, mineral and organic matter, moreover, it can be conceptualised – linking back to Haraway's argument – as an assemblage (which also includes the aforementioned beavers) that has collectively ‘acted’ on Russian tanks by impeding their movement.
Second, two of the interviewees commented on how rivers have halted Russian advances. Of particular note is the Irpin River. In February 2022, at the start of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian forces rendered the river impassable by breaching the Irpin dam (Gleick et al., 2023). This had some negative consequences for ecosystems (Conflict and Environment Observatory, 2024), 10 which, framed in agential terms, illustrates the ‘fluid nature of the balance of human–water agency’ (Strang, 2014: 143). Water does not always or only do what we want it to do. Nevertheless, Ukrainian forces were effectively working with the river, harnessing its own agency to hold back Russian forces and prevent them from entering Kyiv. One of the botanists therefore stressed that ‘we need to treat natural complexes such as rivers, as well as forests and bogs, as our allies, and this is an additional reason to respect and protect them’ (interview, 22 November 2024).
Pulling all of this together, the larger point is that war and armed conflict challenge us to address ‘and indeed to overcome the Cartesian “ontological conceit” that ours is a world ineluctably divisible into agents and non-agents, subjects and objects, humans and nonhumans and that the relations between these two binaries is fixed’ (Staddon, 2009: 70). By extension, thus, they also challenge us to move past the restrictive anthropocentricity of transitional justice by being attentive to more-than-human worlds – including in ways that extend beyond harm-centred discussions.
This, in turn, raises some intriguing questions about how to practically operationalise acknowledgement of interwoven agencies in transitional justice contexts. Possibilities include the creation of memorials and interactive museums or art exhibitions that capture human and other-than-human experiences of war – like the soundscape exhibition that resulted from this research – and explore the different roles that more-than-human worlds have played. These are just some ideas that would contribute to fostering important ‘narratives about the way humans and their agentic partners intersect in the making of the world’ (Iovino and Oppermann, 2014: 6). Relatedly, they would stimulate discussion and reflection on some of the ways that war facilitates or necessitates new cross-world interactions. An interviewee who fought in the Armed Forces of Ukraine before becoming injured, for example, talked about interactions between soldiers and animals on the front line (see also Smith and Kuzyo, 2024). Emphasising that this is quite a widespread phenomenon, he explained: ‘I think that it is some sort of way to express your positive feelings, to express your love, to express care’ (interview, 7 December 2024).
Another possibility is the development of community projects. Polyanska (2023), for example, outlines some of the Russia–Ukraine war's environmental impacts in Sviatoshynsky Forest, near the city of Irpin in Kyiv region. She notes that at one site, ‘the team counted 37 pine trees missing their crowns, broken during mortar attacks. Local residents told foresters that these trees saved their homes when they blocked flying projectiles’. It would be fascinating to explore with these local residents how these trees might be recognised and made visible within (informal) justice processes. Such discussions could also extend, linking to the particular examples of agency referred to in this section, to animals, mud/soil and rivers. It is pertinent to note here that after the Irpin River was flooded in February 2022, a local ecologist called for it to be given the title of ‘Hero River’, arguing that together with Ukraine's armed forces and territorial defence forces, it had ‘played one of the most important roles in the defence of our capital for the last 1000 years’ (in Mundy, 2022).
Acknowledging the Capacity of More-Than-Human Worlds to Recover
All interviewees were asked some questions about transitional justice and the different forms that it might take in Ukraine. Some interviewees insisted that discussions about transitional justice should be located within a larger green recovery framework. As one of them reflected, ‘we need to have green recovery firmly on the table and to find a place for ecosystems and environmental issues in all aspects of the recovery process, including transitional justice’ (interview, 14 January 2025). Others proposed an arrangement – as a type of reparative justice – whereby Ukraine would use Russian resources, such as agricultural lands and forests, for x number of years, to help rebuild its economy and to give its own lands and ecosystems time to fully restore.
Some interviewees, however, questioned whether more-than-human worlds actually need anything from transitional justice. Highlighting the (previously mentioned) restoration of the Great Meadow on the site of the former Kakhovka reservoir, one of the botanists stressed that ‘We have to understand that nature is not waiting for us to make a decision and to do something. It recovers where it can and in the way that it can’ (interview, 22 November 2024). There are many other examples that illustrate this point. One of the best known is the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), created following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. The many consequences and legacies of the disaster have been extensively written about. To note just a few, radionuclide contamination has had significant impacts on multiple biota, including stress and mortality in trees (Davids and Tyler, 2003; Yoschenko et al., 2018); and studies have found a variety of radiation-induced effects in animals, such as genetic damage, increased mutation rates and radiobiological changes (see, e.g. Lypska et al., 2022; Møller et al., 2011). The consequences for people have also been huge and they include increased incidents of thyroid cancer. By 2002, for example, ‘more than 4000 cases of thyroid cancer had been diagnosed in children and adolescents residing in the regions of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia that were contaminated by radioactive fallout’ (Nikiforov, 2006). 11
It is also important to note, however, that the ecological consequences of the disaster are mixed. UNEP (2020), for example, highlights that the CEZ, which spans an area of 30 kilometres around the former nuclear plant, ‘now represents the third-largest nature reserve in mainland Europe and has become an iconic – if accidental – experiment in rewilding’. Research has found a healthy abundance of animals within the CEZ (Deryabina et al., 2015) and increased forest cover (Matsala et al., 2021). According to Laurila (2023: 47), ‘New trees and vegetal growth fill the expanding cracks in the concrete and weave around rusted metal structures. Wild boars, elk, dogs, wolves, foxes and bears roam the Zone’.
None of this, of course, detracts from the huge scale of destruction that occurred and its long-term legacies; and as Turnbull (2020: 2) asserts, ‘it is unhelpful to view the CEZ through the lens of a simplistic ‘“apocalyptic Eden” vs “toxic wasteland” binary’. What this section primarily seeks to convey, specifically in relation to transitional justice, is that we potentially do an injustice to more-than-human worlds by neglecting some of the many ways that they can recover (at least partially) from, and adapt to, major shocks and stressors.
12
Their ability to do so is especially relevant to the issue of reparations. These are very much based on an interventionist logic; the idea that something needs to be done. Principle 9(1) of the International Law Commission's (ILC) Draft Principles of Protection of the Environment in Armed Conflicts, for example, states that: An internationally wrongful act of a State, in relation to an armed conflict, that causes damage to the environment entails the international responsibility of that State, which is under an obligation to make full reparation for such damage, including damage to the environment in and of itself. (ILC, 2022)
Furthermore, interviewees often gave examples of how the war has helped more-than-human worlds and ecologies. Several of them highlighted in this regard the fact that hunting is banned during the period of martial law. What they overwhelmingly sought to make salient, to be clear, is not that war is beneficial to more-than-human worlds, but simply that factors such as reduced anthropogenic (including recreational) pressures can have positive effects for local populations of some species. According to the marine biologist interviewed, for instance, ‘the lack of illegal fishing in the Black Sea, the lack of large numbers of tourists and the closure of the northern part of the Black Sea have helped to restore populations of some rare species of molluscs and fish’ (interview, 14 January 2025).
These examples spotlight two pivotal points. The first is that there is a crucial yet, to date, unexplored role for scientists – including botanists, ecologists and zoologists – to play in transitional justice processes. This role is twofold; it involves both assessing the harms done to more-than-human worlds and analysing whether and to what extent they are recovering. The second point is that reparations policies should not disrupt or disturb natural regeneration processes. Rather, they should support and work with them. As one of the interviewees reflected, ‘Life will always find its way, and we should carefully help it, but not think that we are smarter than nature’ (interview, 22 November 2022). Expressing a similar view, another interviewee, also a botanist, maintained that the best way forward will be a policy of very limited action. ‘This doesn’t mean that we do nothing’, she explained; ‘It means that we should focus on monitoring the biodiversity situation, but without trying to change anything by our direct and large-scale actions’ (interview, 11 October 2024). Heeding these two points is an essential part of developing more inclusive approaches to transitional justice that respect and acknowledge the agency of more-than-human worlds.
Listening to More-Than-Human Worlds
There is a third key aspect of opening up the field of transitional justice to more-than-human worlds and their experiences of war – and it entails listening to them and to the information that they can communicate through sound. In the area of soil acoustics, for example, a variety of factors – from invasive species and moisture content to compaction by livestock or farming machinery – have been found to affect what soil sounds like (see, e.g. Robinson et al., 2024); and these sounds can also tell us about soil diversity (see, e.g. Maeder et al., 2022). As Haskell (2017: vii) argues, ‘To listen is…to touch a stethoscope to the skin of a landscape, to hear what stirs below’. Sound has additionally been shown to provide valuable information, inter alia, about the healthiness of coral reefs (Lamont et al., 2022), the impact of wastewater discharge events from outfall pipes along rivers (Chen et al., 2024) and the recovery of forests from fire (Metcalf et al., 2024). Sound, as ‘the heartbeat of the biosphere’ (Farina and Gage, 2017: 3), is thus extremely relevant to transitional justice and to developing the field in new directions that address its traditional neglect of more-than-human worlds.
First, incorporating sound into formal transitional justice mechanisms – such as criminal trials, truth commissions and reparations processes – could provide additional insights into the environmental consequences of war. In a recent article that centres on the soundscape recordings that interviewees made, for example, I analyse in detail what sound can reveal about some of the environmental impacts of the Russia–Ukraine war (Clark, 2025). In their own research, Atemasov and Atemasova recorded sounds in five different types of forest – including a mature oak forest and a young forest – in the National Park ‘Homilshanski Lisy’, in Kharkiv region, in north-eastern Ukraine, between April and July 2020. They found that increasing forest age translated into higher scores on the acoustic complexity index (ACI) (Atemasov and Atemasova, 2023: 59). In another study, focused on seven plots in the National Nature Park ‘Gomilshansky Forests’ in Kharkiv region, they found that ‘forest bird species are sensitive to stand age and tree species composition as well as the amount of dead wood’ (Atemasov and Atemasova, 2019: 75). Although the authors undertook their research in forests unaffected by war, their findings indirectly illustrate the potential of using sound as one possible way (combined with other methods) of assessing the impact of the full-scale invasion on Ukraine's forests. What, for example, does war do to a forest's ACI? How does dead wood from forest fires affect bird and insect vocalisations? The optimal approach would be to compare pre-war forest soundscapes with current forest soundscapes. Additionally, soundscape recordings could be made over a period of time, to capture worsening levels of damage to forests and other ecosystems.
Second, and linked to the thematic of recovery discussed in the previous section, sound could be used to assess and monitor how different ecosystems are responding to the impacts of the war. Duarte et al.'s (2021) research, for example, used an eco-acoustics approach to study the impact on fauna of wildfire in a savanna in Brazil. More specifically, they used passive acoustic monitoring devices to compare and contrast biophonic activity in two different sites, one burnt and one unburnt, over a period of one year and one month. This is very relevant, given the widespread scale of burnt and destroyed forests in Ukraine. While the authors’ results showed that this period of time was insufficient for the full recovery of fauna in the savanna, they also found, acoustically, that ‘the differences between the sites were less evident one year after the disturbance’ (Duarte et al., 2021). To take a more direct example, one of the interviewees uploaded a recording that he made while undertaking fieldwork in the Yelanets Steppe Nature Reserve in Mykolaiv region, in southern Ukraine. Accompanying the geophonic sound of wind blowing through the long grasslands is the territorial call of the Common pheasant (Phasianus colchicus). Noting that he saw at least 35 of these birds, the interviewee emphasised that: The recording is ultimately about the resilience of nature – and how in many respects it doesn’t care about what is happening around it (war, agricultural activity, etc.). The Yelanets Steppe Nature Reserve was created specifically to protect nature – and nature continues to thrive here. (post-interview correspondence, 2 April 2025)
This, in turn, brings into focus the importance of education. Existing scholarship on transitional justice and education has mainly concentrated on curriculum issues and the challenges of teaching subjects such as History (see, e.g. Cole, 2007; Keynes, 2019). Yet there is considerable and unexplored scope for developing eco-education that not only addresses the environmental legacies of war, but also actively encourages attentiveness and openness to more-than-human worlds. One of the two herpetologists, for example, proposed introducing a subject called ‘Nature and War’. In her words, ‘If we keep learning from this experience [of war] and if we transfer this knowledge and this experience to the next generation, maybe this will in some way compensate nature for all the losses that humanity has caused it to suffer’ (interview, 13 November 2024). Another interviewee explained she has been involved for a number of years in teaching ecological education to children. In this context, she recounted an event that occurred shortly after the start of the full-scale invasion when she was working as a volunteer paramedic. She was travelling on a bus to a block post (like a roadblock) and a young man approached her, telling her that she had taught him about birds of prey when he was in school. The interviewee recalled that there were sounds of artillery nearby, and this man was talking to her about a picture of a White-tailed eagle that he has in his home. ‘And in that moment’, she underlined, ‘I understood that our ecological education work has results and that we must do more’ (interview, 25 November 2024).
Ultimately, transitional justice scholars and practitioners have much to gain from inviting ‘the (previously) inaudible voices of non-humans into their discussions’ (Weaver and Snaza, 2017: 1059). Experimenting with soundscape recordings and exploring new educational pathways are just two possibilities that merit further attention and offer great potential to acoustically develop and expand the field of transitional justice. Ukraine could be a pioneer in taking forward some of these ideas, just as it is very much a pioneer in investigating and prosecuting environmental war crimes and ecocide. At the same time, all of the arguments made in this section and indeed the two previous sections have a much wider relevance and application beyond the Russia–Ukraine war.
Conclusion
Victoria Amelina's recent book Looking at Women Looking at War, published posthumously after she was killed by a Russian missile in the city of Kramatorsk in July 2023, contains an extract from the diary of Yulia Kakulya-Danylyuk, a Ukrainian librarian. In the extract, dated 24 March 2022, Kakulya-Danylyuk writes: Sometimes, when I’m very scared, I imagine that I am water. I seep into the ground, hide in cracks, flow deep down to underground springs. But then a shell comes flying, everything trembles, the earth shakes, and even water cannot find peace. There's no peace to be found anywhere right now… (in Amelina, 2025: 70).
These developments are acutely relevant to building a more inclusive transitional justice architecture that addresses the traditional marginalisation of more-than-human worlds. The conceptualisation of justice that this article embraces, however, ‘insists on attention to relationships, or the relational worlds within which individuals always exist and are sustained’ (Celermajer and Otjen, 2024: 52–53) – and harm-centred narratives are not enough in this regard. What the article has fundamentally argued, therefore, is that just as acknowledging and addressing the harms done to more-than-human worlds is essential, so too is acknowledging and being attentive to multiple and interactive expressions of agency within these worlds. Drawing on original empirical data in the form of semi-structured interviews and soundscape recordings, it has introduced and examined three key ideas – namely, recognising the contributions of more-than-human worlds in war, acknowledging their ability to recover (even if only partially) from harms and listening to them. Additionally, it has reflected on some possible ways of practically translating these ideas into transitional justice.
It is important to reiterate that they are not presented as a ‘template’ to be followed. They are exploratory ideas intended to generate new conversations and debates. Going forward, they can be fruitfully discussed both in Ukraine and in other societies dealing with mass crimes and their myriad legacies. Ultimately, they are ideas that can contribute to moving the field of transitional justice in exciting new directions that reflect and give expression to multi-agentic and interconnected worlds. To cite Haskell (2017: viii), ‘We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network’.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Oleksii Marushchak for helping to organise some of the interviews and for acting as an interpreter when required. I would also like to sincerely thank all of the interviewees who participated in my research. Finally, I extend my gratitude to two anonymous reviewers for their extremely thorough and helpful comments.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (grant number RF-2024-137).
