Environmental (in)security,peacebuilding and green economic recovery in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine

Abstract

In addition to the loss of many lives and livelihoods, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has also led to direct and indirect harm to the environment in Ukraine and other parts of the world: local ecosystems have been destroyed and polluted, affecting human security and health as well as biodiversity for many years to come. Any attempt to build a sustainable peace after the war will have to consider these environmental insecurities and their origins in historically asymmetric relationships between Ukraine and external actors centred around resource extractivism. In this paper, we pursue a complementary approach between the political ecology and environmental peacebuilding scholarships: while the former offers an interrogation of larger power structures and practices at this environment–conflict nexus, ranging from Russian imperialism to a sought-after European integration, the latter enables a discussion of the conditions under which the necessary environmental recovery and remediation initiatives may contribute to local peacebuilding instead of further conflict. Taking both approaches together, we argue that the key to a politically and environmentally sustainable peace lies in the centring of Ukrainian civil society and local communities.

As part of the Special Issue on ‘From Climate Conflicts to Environmental Peacebuilding’ edited by Tobias Ide, Natalia Dalmer, Anselm Vogler and Jan Sändig.

1. Introduction: Not a silent victim any longer?

The scale and nature of Russia’s war against Ukraine ¹ in 2022 to 2023 are in many ways extraordinary: hundreds of thousands are killed or wounded, Europe is witnessing the fastest growing international and internal forced migration event since World War II with millions on the move (UNHCR, 2022, 2023), and the European security architecture has experienced, in the words of German Chancellor Scholz a ‘Zeitenwende’, a ‘watershed in the history of our continent’ (Scholz, 2022). The environmental dimension of the war is equally extraordinary: the war, which has been ongoing in the Donbas region since 2014 (OSCE, 2017), destroyed and polluted large natural parks, extensive agricultural regions, unique marine ecosystems and killed many wild and domestic animals (Early, 2023). In June 2023, the blowing up of the Kakhovka dam and hydropower plant led to large-scale flooding and pollution downstream, destroyed riparian ecosystems and stopped irrigation of the large agricultural areas in Ukraine’s south for years to come. Abandoned arable land could even be lost and revert to steppe lands (CEOBS, 2023). Furthermore, Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhia, and one of Europe’s biggest steel plants, Azovstal in Mariupol, have been turned into battle zones, and in the heavily embattled and once heavily industrialised Donbas region, drinking water and soils have been contaminated through ordnance as well as leaked chemicals (Zwijnenburg, 2017). Overall, a joint assessment by the Government of Ukraine, the World Bank Group, the European Commission and the United Nations estimates that the cost of reconstruction and recovery has grown to 383 billion Euro as of February 2023 (World Bank, 2023).

Although an end to the war is not yet in sight, the question of how to rebuild Ukraine is a major issue already. The article contributes to this discussion. As we show below, sustainable peace – understood as a socially, economically and politically resilient peace with ecological foundations (cf. Krampe, 2017; Krampe & Swain, 2021) – in Ukraine can only come about if the causes and consequences of the environmental catastrophe associated with the war are addressed. This requires not only international support and cooperation but also local knowledge and ownership of the people in Ukraine. In this article, we therefore combine both levels in the analysis, the integration into international structures and the activation of local actors. As a first step, the article exposes political power structures and asymmetries that go beyond the war and that help explain the current environmental crisis. This perspective is necessary to reveal the risks of new asymmetries that may be associated with Ukraine’s European integration. In a second step, and building on this, we make existing knowledge from the field of environmental peacebuilding applicable to the case of Ukraine. In particular, activating and enabling local civil society initiatives is one approach to undermining existing and possible new power asymmetries.

Usually, the environment is considered a silent victim during armed conflicts but the extraordinary scale of environmental damages in the wake of the Russian aggression has received rather significant attention in politics as well as in the media. Environmental damages have been recorded by the Ukrainian government and civil society early on and there has been sustained media coverage of this environmental dimension of warfare, arguably more than in other armed conflicts. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy very prominently put a spotlight on this urgent need for environmental remediation and recovery and condemned the environmental damages as ‘ecocide’ in his Ten Point Peace Plan. Ecocide is an emerging but not yet widely adopted norm in international criminal law, which is defined as ‘unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts’ (Siddique, 2021). Notably, both Ukraine and Russia are part of a small number of states that have already included ecocide as a crime in their respective domestic legislation (Ecocide Law, 2023).

In an address to the New Zealand Parliament in December 2022, Zelenskyy further argued that ‘[t]here’s no true peace where the consequences of war could be there in the form of poisoned groundwater that may destroy normal lives in several countries. There’s no true peace where ecocide has taken place and its consequences have not been neutralised’ (Radio New Zealand, 2022). Moreover, the Ukrainian Ministry of the Environment has tried very hard to document and publicise the environmental damages caused by the Russian aggression. At COP 27 in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Ukrainian officials, as well as Ukrainian civil society actors, successfully used the Ukrainian pavilion, the first ever of the country at any COP, to draw attention to the environmental toll of Russian warfare and how it is enabled by revenue from Russian fossil fuel exports (Kottasová, 2022). The environmental damages form a case of slow violence, which develops gradually and whose damage extends far into the future (Nixon, 2011: 2). Existing research shows the negative effects of military conflicts on air, water and soil (Lawrence et al., 2015). In a very short time, human actions alter landscapes in such a way that the possibility of restoring the original state is severely limited (Hupy, 2008). These impacts are unintentional but also intentional damages that are part of military strategies (Westing, 2006, 84-87). There rarely are positive environmental effects from conflicts, such as, for example, that natural areas are not exploited or accessible at the time of a conflict (ibid. 93). Long-term studies on the impact of conflict on the environment show that, in particular, wealth and democratisation have a positive influence on the recovery of biocapacity in a former conflict area (Pathak, 2020). Therefore, both are important to further long-term goals for the reconstruction of Ukraine. The slow violence of environmental damages amplifies the human toll and will likely complicate any post-conflict recovery. Accordingly, any peacebuilding process in Ukraine will have to address these direct and indirect environmental insecurities very clearly.

In this paper, we make the argument that it matters for any stable peace in Ukraine how these environmental insecurities are dealt with on a local as well as an international level. This goes beyond an eventual end of fighting between Ukraine and Russia and involves conflicts and grievances in Ukraine’s eastern oblasts, which are occupied and illegally annexed by Russia, as well as problems with internal and international migration while potentially impacting European neighbours as well. On the one hand, the damage and exploitation of the environment are tied to power structures that go beyond the ongoing war or have even paved their way. On the other hand, environmental destruction and pollution are substantial challenges for the health and livelihoods of local communities as well as for the rebuilding of the Ukrainian economy and infrastructure and Ukraine’s aspired integration into European political and economic structures.

To start tackling this problem of the environmental damage caused by this war, we are bringing together the literature about environmental peacebuilding as well as political ecology, which can be fruitfully combined for ‘mutual enrichment’ (Ide et al., 2023). In our view, both approaches can be brought together in a complementary way: while a political ecology approach allows us to account for the larger international and historical context, the environmental peacebuilding scholarship enables insight into how local problem-solving strategies for these environmental insecurities might look like (see also Sändig et al., 2024). Furthermore, to be successful, local environmental peacebuilding initiatives will have to be vetted against the historical and political context in which they are implemented. Environmental peacebuilding scholarship tends to neglect the importance of wider power structures (Davis et al., 2023) which is exactly what a critical, power-sensitive approach such as political ecology can provide though.

Our analysis has three major parts. The first section employs an international political ecology perspective and asks about the larger power structures and practices at this environment–conflict nexus, ranging from Russian imperialism to the sought-after European integration. The second section reviews the already existing recovery plans and investigates how the Ukrainian agriculture and energy sectors are supposed to be integrated into European structures in the context of the Green Deal. The third and final section focuses on the local Ukrainian context against this historical and international backdrop, it discusses the challenges that local initiatives face from these wider power structures, their potential for environmental remediation and recovery, as well as the support of more peaceful local relations.

2. A complementary approach: Critical problem-solving, from the international to the local

Political ecology and environmental peacebuilding are two distinct, generally separate scholarships engaged with investigating the relationship between the environment, peace and conflict. Our main intention is to use both approaches to better understand the problem of environmental damage from the war and to describe pathways for dealing with this problem. By doing so, the analysis at hand does offer a case study of what a more ‘sustained dialogue’ (Ide et al., 2023: 24) between the different scholarships working on the environment–peace–conflict nexus might look like in practice.

Political ecology brings together different research theories and practices. Common to all political ecology perspectives is a sensitivity to historically formed power structures and practices and a normative commitment to social and environmental justice (cf. Neumann, 2016; Sultana, 2020). Thus, political ecology brings historical, post-colonial and political dimensions to the study of the environment, peace and conflict (see also Amador-Jimenez et al., 2024). Such a perspective is often critical of capitalist processes of privatisation and commercialisation, especially with regard to land, as well as the exclusionary militarisation of conservation or fortress conservation (Le Billon, 2023). The latter term describes nature conservation practices aimed at protecting some ‘untouched wilderness’ from human activity, often forcibly displacing local and indigenous communities (cf. Zaitchik, 2018).

From this perspective, conflicts are often seen as emancipatory struggles aimed at overcoming unjust power relations and calls to prevent or stop them (e.g. by more depoliticised and technical peacebuilding approaches), hence ‘may be interpreted as “pacifying” efforts that risk undermining the emancipatory struggles of aggrieved communities’ (Le Billon, 2023: 14). Generally, political ecology perspectives tend to caution against eco-determinist thinking where future developments are only determined by environmental changes, stressing the importance of political and economic forces and structures as the cause and consequence of ecological transformations (Le Billon & Duffy, 2018).

An international political ecology approach suggested by Selby et al. (2022: 18ff.) builds on these perspectives – which are often very place based – dedicating particular attention to the ‘international’ as a constitutive feature of world politics and ‘internal’ processes within countries alike. The ambition of this approach is not to solely focus on the international state level or to assume a sort of unitary character of all states but to take the multiplicity of these main entities of political and economic relations, and their boundaries and hierarchies more seriously again for the analysis of environment-related conflicts and insecurities. For Selby et al., this approach is accordingly trying to

attend both to the consequences of international relations for the environment and environment-related insecurities […] and, conversely, to the diverse ways in which the appropriation, transformation and circulation of nature and its resources is complicit in processes of nation-building and state-building and the constitution of geopolitical orders. (2022: 22-23)

In contrast to this international-centric perspective, a more place-based political ecology approach could, for example, focus on how in early 2022 the Russo-Ukrainian War unfolded in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster. Such a study could investigate the struggles of internally displaced Donbas war refugees who found a new home after 2014 in previously abandoned villages on the edge of the exclusion zone where they engage in subsistence farming of the radioactively polluted soils (Girbes, 2022), where wildlife had also thrived again in the decades since the nuclear disaster (Reynolds, 2022), and where the Ukrainian government once had plans for a large-scale solar plant (Vidal, 2016).

A sound understanding of such local-level dynamics is of great complementary value for environmental peacebuilding scholarships, in particular where a better understanding of the ‘local, everyday experience of environmental peacebuilding’ (Ide et al., 2023: 11) has been identified as major research gap. Environmental peacebuilding is a rapidly growing body of scholarship that is concerned with the sustainable management of natural resources before, during or after conflict, emphasising the potential for environmental governance as a cooperative endeavour between conflict parties to support peace and stability, albeit under certain conditions only (Ide, 2018). There is a dark side to environmental peacebuilding efforts, however, as the often very technical environmental initiatives can lead to depoliticisation, displacement, discrimination, deterioration into conflict, delegitimisation of the state and degradation of the environment (Ide, 2020).

Against this backdrop, we argue that a complementary approach has the potential to bridge the analytical divide between critical analysis and problem-solving (Cox, 1981: 128-130) with regard to the nexus of environment and conflict: although a problem-solving perspective generally takes the social world as it is and focusses on the management of concrete and pressing problems, a critical approach interrogates the formation and stabilisation of social order against the backdrop of a history of power. In our view, a complementary approach between political ecology and environmental peacebuilding allows for what Eckersley called critical problem-solving, which incrementally ‘looks for ways to unsettle at least some of [the fixed and unjust] parameters’ (Eckersley, 2021: 256) of problematic social structures; in this case, the historically asymmetric relationships between Ukraine and external actors centred around resource extractivism. According to Eckersley, for transformative critical problem-solving, the ‘practical task is to identify the next best transition steps with the greatest transformative potential in the relevant context’ (Ibid.: 257). Our ambition in this article is accordingly to use these general insights from the environmental peacebuilding scholarship and the political ecology literature in a critical problem-solving fashion to point towards the promises and pitfalls of managing environmental risks and natural resources in Ukraine during and after the current war, especially with regard to the aspired integration into European political and economic structures.

In the end, a critical problem-solving approach, which uses a local ownership perspective, associated with environmental peacebuilding insights, and international political ecology findings as complementary analytical lenses allows us to determine the ‘next best’ step of local peacebuilding options when oriented towards environmental and social justice in the post-conflict recovery process. This contrasts with the mainstream of liberal peacebuilding, which tends to operate more with top-down, template-style solutions orientated towards high politics such as the democratisation of state institutions, the strengthening of rule of law and human rights reforms as well as marketisation strategies (cf. Wallis, 2018).

Taking the political ecology approach seriously also with regard to methodology, we need to reflect on our positionalities as peace and conflict researchers based in Germany in this context: our expertise lies in the field of peace and conflict research related to environmental issues. Our perspective is a European one and we are investigating the war situation in Ukraine from the outside. Our expertise is not that of regional experts for Ukraine, and this is also where the limits of our research lie: we have no access to the situation on the ground in Ukraine. Yet, through the critical problem-solving approach proposed in this article, we are still able to conclude how historical and international power structures matter for what is possible and necessary for sustainable peace in terms of local peacebuilding. We have endeavoured to fill the access gap through cooperation with Ukrainian colleagues and established contacts in this regard since the summer of 2022. However, due to the ongoing war, we were unable to develop the planned cooperation on the ground beyond some initial consultations. We hope that this will be possible in subsequent projects.

In the following analysis, we turn first to the larger historical international power structures and practices, ranging from Russian imperialism, Soviet-enforced collectivisation and rapid industrialisation to the sought-after European integration, at the nexus of a contested Ukrainian postcolonial nationhood and the role of its agricultural and energy resources in the international political economy. Against this backdrop, we then undertake a first review of the currently debated green recovery plans with a focus on the role of Ukrainian energy and agricultural sectors in this re-structuring of European–Ukrainian relations. Second, we zoom in to the local Ukrainian context of managing war-related environmental destruction and explore what promises and pitfalls environmental peacebuilding practices and initiatives might have for de-escalating actual and potential conflicts on the ground between local communities and internally displaced persons, international refugees and returnees who are often women, civilians and combatants, neighbours and (former) enemies.

3. Imperialist ambitions against Ukraine throughout modern history

3.1. From the late 18th century to the late 20th century

Ukraine has faced various imperial ambitions in its modern history, starting with its colonisation by the Russian Empire, then a rapidly rising European power in the late 18th century (Plokhy, 2015: 133ff). The foreign policy of the Russian empress Catherine II, in particular, shaped Southern Ukraine for centuries to come: she abolished the autonomy held by the Cossack Hetmanate in 1764, formally annexed the Crimean Khanate in 1783 and embarked on a colonial project to build a ‘New Russia’ through (re)naming the newly conquered lands with Greek-sounding names such as Odesa, Kherson or Mariupol, resettling migrants from her Empire and the whole Black Sea region while also displacing large numbers of Crimean Tatars (Plokhy, 2015: 141ff.) At the same time, the Prussian, Austrian and Russian empires partitioned away the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which by 1795 had been destroyed. The Russian Empire now also controlled the Baltics, Lithuania as well as parts of Belarus and through the addition of the region of Volhynia in Western Ukraine, while the Habsburg Empire controlled the region of Galicia around Lviv.

It was the agricultural and energy resources from these colonised regions, Crimea, the Donbas as well as Galicia, which soon played a critical role in industrialisation and in economically sustaining their respective imperial centres in Moscow and Vienna. Galicia, on the other hand, was the birthplace of the European oil industry, and the resource-rich Donets River Basin soon developed into the centre of coal and steel industries in Imperial Russia. The new port city of Odesa developed into the largest export gateway for grain from the fertile Ukrainian steppe regions, with the first railroad in Southern Ukraine connecting the port to the agrarian hinterland, earning Ukraine the nickname of ‘Europe’s breadbasket’. According to Plokhy (2015: 177), in the mid-19th century, Ukraine accounted for 75% of all exports from the Russian Empire.

These examples show how the social and economic history of Southern and Eastern Ukraine was significantly shaped by extractivist interests from a distant imperial centre in Russia throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. In the early 20th century, Ukraine, now part of the Soviet Union, found itself again in the centre of Moscow’s efforts for its economic development. The Soviet leadership saw Ukraine both ‘as a source of funds for industrialization, given its agricultural output and potential, and as an area for investment, given the preexisting industrial potential in the east and south of the republic’ (Plokhy, 2015: 246). Accordingly, a centrepiece of Stalin’s First Five Year Plan (1928–1933) was the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, one of the largest power plants at that time, which was meant to power and stimulate rapid Soviet industrialisation while also flooding 50 communities (Gorin, 2022). Furthermore, in an attempt to turn Ukraine into a defensive fortress for the Union (Plokhy, 2015: 245ff.), the Kremlin started several other large-scale industrial enterprises, among them the Azovstal steelworks, the Kharkiv Turbogenerator Plant, as well as Dnipro Aluminum Plant. At the same time, Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation and ruthless grain procurement destroyed local social and economic peasant structures, forcing many to either work in farm collectives, new industrial projects, migrate or be displaced, or die from hunger. Close to 4 million people died from hunger in the resulting Great Famine or Holodomor from 1932 to 1934 (Plokhy, 2015: 253).

Hitler’s interest in Ukraine was likewise motivated by the fertile richness of its steppe regions, where he envisioned Lebensraum for German settler colonists, after having displaced and killed local populations (cf. Lower, 2005). The Second World War subsequently started by Nazi Germany cost the lives of almost 7 million Ukrainian citizens, among them around 1 million Jews. As Plokhy concludes, ‘With its pre-1914 reputation as the breadbasket of Europe and one of the highest concentrations of Jews on the continent, Ukraine would become both a prime object of German expansionism and one of the Nazis’ main victims’ (2015: 260).

More recently, in 1986, the Chornobyl nuclear disaster also illustrates the imperial relationship between the core in Moscow and the periphery in the non-Russian republics (Kuzio, 2002: 241). The initial impulse to bring nuclear power to Ukraine came from Ukrainian leaders and elites but the secrecy and inaction around the accident from the Kremlin leaders led the Ukrainians to see nuclear power as yet another ‘instrument of Moscow’s domination of their republic’ (Plokhy, 2015: 312). The radiation fallout directly affected around 3 million people as well as another 30 million who depended on the Dnipro water supply. Furthermore, the old forests in the Polesia region, which had for millennia provided ‘shelter from the nomads and food for survivors of the Great Famine of 1932 and 1933 became sources of destruction’ (Plokhy, 2015: 311) through radiation. Plokhy writes that the disaster ‘awakened Ukraine, raising fundamental questions about relations between the center and the republics, the Communist Party and the people’ (2015: 312) and with it a Ukrainian ecological movement that clearly criticised these centre–periphery relations.

3.2. Independent Ukraine and the Russo-Ukrainian war

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kuzio (2002: 241) speaks accordingly of a ‘profound’ postcolonial legacy for independent Ukraine as well as Belarus, stemming from the economic and political domination by the Russian and Soviet ‘colonial empires’. In the Soviet Union, the ‘language of modernity’ through the processes of urbanisation and industrialisation ‘was Russian, with the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages defined as regional, parochial dialects’ (Kuzio, 2002: 245). The economic legacy of the ‘Russian-Soviet industrial colonialism’ also kept the Ukrainian economy dependent on Russian supply and markets, especially with regard to gas pipelines, chemical products as well as nuclear fuel and equipment, ‘which often acted as instruments of political pressure on the Ukrainian authorities and created obstacles to structurally transforming its economy’ (Gorin, 2022). To be fair, Ukraine’s role as a major transit country for Russian gas destined for European markets also gave the country some leverage over Russia in terms of tariffs, frustrating the latter (Thompson, 2022a: 74).

Russia ultimately built the Nord Stream pipeline through the Baltic Sea with Germany, circumventing and thus weakening Ukraine. Germany was concerned about political and economic instability in Ukraine and sought a way to mitigate this risk through the new pipeline, much to the chagrin of Ukraine and other East European neighbour states who aimed at reducing Russian influence in the EU (Thompson, 2022a: 75). In effect, Germany became

complicit in Putin’s strategic bid to eliminate Ukraine as a transit state for transporting Russian gas into Europe; it agreed to build the first Nord Stream pipeline – which runs under the Baltic Sea – in 2005, just months after the Orange Revolution, and the second in 2015, a year after Russia annexed Crimea. (Thompson, 2022b)

Germany’s high dependence on Russian fossil fuels had roots in the Ostpolitik rapprochement of the 1970s, then justified through the idea of fostering trust and cooperation and ultimately social and political change through trade and growing economic interdependence (‘Wandel durch Handel’), but from the 2000s it was driven by a lack of strategic foresight, a narrow focus on cheap Russian gas to power the German heavy industry as well as personal enrichment (Wintour, 2022). Gerhard Schröder, the former Social democrat chancellor of Germany and Vladimir Putin’s personal friend who later worked for several Russian state-owned fossil fuel companies, such as Nord Stream, Rosneft and Gazprom, embodies all of these aspects perfectly.

Finally, the aforementioned Soviet-built Azovstal steel factory in the now razed city of Mariupol illustrates the complicity of Ukrainian oligarchs in the exploitative and environmentally harmful post-Soviet political economy. The Azovstal factory was for many years heavily criticised by Mariupol residents because of the high levels of industrial air pollution, prompting several protests (Datskevych, 2018). Pollution levels in the city were around 10 times higher than the national average but environmental monitoring and tighter regulation were for a long time lacking. Critics and environmental NGOs argued that this was due to corruption and the influence of powerful oligarchs (Gardiner, 2021). The factory belonged to the Metinvest Mining and Steel group of Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest person, the owner of Ukraine’s largest financial and industrial conglomerate SCM Group, the Shakhtar Donetsk football club, and (until 2022) several national media outlets. Known as the ‘King of Donbas’ and once a Member of Parliament for the now banned Pro-Russian Party of Regions of former President Viktor Yanukovych, Akhmetov was considered the most influential oligarch in Ukrainian politics (Shevchenko, 2023). As such, he was also one of the main targets of President Zelenskyy ‘de-oligarchization’ policy (Sullivan et al., 2022).

This very brief historical background on Russian-Soviet imperial domination of Ukraine, especially in relation to its natural resources and industrial base, is noteworthy for several reasons: first, it shows how today’s Ukrainian political, economic and social structures as well as natural environments have been shaped by centuries of imperial domination and extractivism. Overcoming these historical dependencies will mean a restructuring of the historically grown Ukrainian infrastructure and economy. Second, Ukraine’s natural endowment, its richness in mineral resources, oil and gas, fertile soil, powerful rivers as well as dense forests have been at the centre of imperial ambition and violence throughout Ukraine’s history. Ukrainian ecosystems have long been exploited and exhausted for the benefit of external actors, with local populations more often than not suffering from resultant costs such as resource depletion, waste, pollution or radiation. In consequence, this unequal distribution of environmental goods and harms makes this conflict centrally also about historical environmental injustices, perpetuated even more by the environmentally destructive way of warfare by the Russian Federation. Third, many of the sites of historical Russian colonisation and industrialisation have become battlefields today, sadly familiar from newspaper articles and television news, such as the industrial heartland of the Donbas region, the Chornobyl nuclear exclusion zone, the Polesian forests, through which Russian troops marched against Kyiv in early 2022, and Azovstal in Mariupol, where the city was razed to the ground by Russian forces, including a memorial for the victims of the Great Famine or Holodomor (Balachuk, 2022). These places resurface the long imperial history of Soviet and Russian ambitions for Ukraine, at least if one knows about this history in the first place. As Malksöö (2022: 1) argues, this context brings two important lessons to the fore: the ‘incompatible logics of sovereignty (Ukraine’s) and imperialism (Russia’s)’ and the ‘relative ignorance of Eastern European insights and the validity of their experiences throughout IR’s [International Relations, the academic discipline] formal existence since the aftermath of the First World War’. Germany, in particular, has a historical responsibility in this regard: because of the vast destruction of Nazi Germany’s war in Soviet Ukraine as well as the long history of the German imperial gaze upon the country (Snyder, 2017).

It seems important to keep in mind these three lessons about the Ukrainian postcolonial legacy and the role of the natural environment in its history when thinking about the different pathways for Ukrainian economic recovery, which is intended to lead to deeper integration in European political and economic structures as well as sustainable development.

4. Analysing plans for Ukraine’s recovery and European integration

Against the backdrop of modern Ukrainian history, today’s resistance against Russian imperial aggression can be seen as an emancipatory anti-imperial struggle – a simple rebuilding of pre-war political and economic structures does not appear to be an option from that perspective. This specific context of the imperialist war of aggression against Ukraine (Malksöö, 2022), the history of Russian extractivism of agricultural and energy resources (Gorin, 2022), as well as the integration with European structures and markets invites a discussion of how environmentally and politically sustainable peacebuilding can function against the backdrop of these historical and current political forces.

In this regard, we undertook an analysis of the most prominent early recovery plans put forward so far by the European Union, the Ukrainian government as well as, for example, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), looking for how European–Ukrainian relations are supposed to be re-structured in a sustainable way, especially also with regard to the agricultural and energy sectors. For this inductive textual analysis, we gathered around 20 English language recovery plans published between February 2022 and March 2023. We then organised the findings around three emerging themes: first, EU–Ukraine alignment and integration, second, the clean break with Russian–Soviet economic structures based on fossil fuels, and third, an inclusive and participatory recovery, which was most clearly voiced by civil society and expert groups.

The European Union’s Green Deal is an ambitious plan to turn the continent net-zero by 2050 but it has also attracted concerns and the question ‘who will this be sustainable for?’ (Duou, 2021). Critics from the Global South have cautioned against the perpetuation of neo-colonial relations, where mineral resources from the Global South are feeding Europe’s move to green technologies (Heiba, 2021). Even before 2022, Ukrainian observers saw environmental opportunities and risks in the European Association agreement (Mamonova, 2018) as well as in Ukraine’s contribution to and alignment with the European Green Deal (Holovko, 2021). The currently debated economic recovery of Ukraine and the country’s integration into European economic and political structures give this discussion renewed relevance. Accordingly, we focus our analysis of the major already existing recovery plans on how Ukrainian agriculture in general and energy sectors in particular are supposed to be integrated into European structures in the context of the Green Deal.

4.1. EU–Ukraine alignment and integration plans

First, we found that the European Commission and the Ukrainian government are very much on the same page in terms of rhetoric and ambition for economic recovery: the explicit political goal is to transform the Ukrainian economy substantially by integrating it into European political and economic markets structures, in particular in line with the EU Green Deal and with regard to energy, agriculture as well as forestry.

The European Commission’s official Rebuild Ukraine plan from May 2022, for example, states the ambition to

create the foundations of a free and prosperous country, anchored in European values, well integrated into the European and global economy, and to support it on its European path. The reconstruction effort will need to build on Ukraine’s ownership, close cooperation and coordination with supporting countries and organisations, and Ukraine’s strategic partnership with the Union. (European Commission, 2022: 3)

One of the four pillars explicitly mentions sustainable trade as well as the need for the reconstruction to be ‘in line with the European green and digital agenda’. The European Commission claims a clear leadership position with regard to Ukraine’s recovery and plans to establish the ‘Ukraine reconstruction platform’, an international coordination platform, co-led by the European Commission and the Ukrainian government. The Ukrainian Parliament and the European Parliament would only participate as observers. This platform is thought of as ‘an overarching and single-entry point for all actions on the reconstruction of Ukraine’ (European Commission, 2022: 4). Furthermore, the planned governance arrangement would have to ensure full ownership by Ukraine while also ensuring that ‘investments – including in strategic digital, transport and energy infrastructure – are brought in line with climate and environmental EU policies and standards’ (European Commission, 2022: 7).

The national recovery plan of the Ukrainian government from July 2022 explicitly states the ‘unique opportunity not just to recover war-related damages, but to leap-frog economic growth and quality of living in Ukraine’ (National Recovery Council, 2022: 2) and emphasises potential synergies with the European Union for the implementation of the EU Green Deal ‘thanks to the vast Ukrainian low-carbon energy resources’ (National Recovery Council, 2022: 7.) In their plan, the National Recovery Council identified 15 ‘National Programs’ to boost Ukraine’s recovery and achieve growth targets. Among the first priorities and strategic imperatives is the goal to ‘Re-build clean and safe environment and ensure sustainable development in line with the EU Green Deal’ (2022: 10). More concretely, the objective is to support the EU’s zero-carbon energy transition by developing ‘zero-carbon power generation (nuclear and RES), increas[ing] gas and biofuels production, develop[ing a] H2 ecosystem linked with EU’ (2022: 10). Moreover, the immediate concern is to provide ‘ecosafety’ by re-building a safe and clean environment through waste removal and demining (2022: 16). With regard to agriculture, the national recovery plan aims for the development of higher-value agricultural produce, the recultivation of damaged land, increased meat and dairy production and processing, ‘precision farming’ as well as larger irrigation systems (National Recovery Council, 2022: 21).

It is not clear yet how European industries and businesses view this European–Ukrainian economic integration and what this means for Ukrainian ambitions to technologically leap-frog and move up the value chain in terms of agricultural output. There is already growing opposition to tariff-free Ukrainian agricultural products on European markets, even from some of the countries’ most supportive of Ukraine: in April 2023, the Prime Ministers of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia wrote a letter to EU Commission President von der Leyen to ask for a reintroduction of tariffs on the goods (Reuters, 2023a). This tension between support for Ukraine and internal politics is the most drastic in Poland: the Polish agriculture minister resigned over the issue of the tariffs (Reuters, 2023b) and low grain prices in Poland led to some much politicised ‘Ukraine fatigue’ in context of the Polish parliamentary elections in October 2023 (Walker, 2023). At some point during the campaign, the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki even vowed to stop providing weaponry to Ukraine amid the growing dispute over grain tariffs.

Most of the high-level attention on economic opportunities between the EU and Ukraine has so far been dedicated to building hydrogen production and trade infrastructure. Hydrogen production in Ukraine does have the potential to contribute to low-carbon steel making, for example, but the substantial role of nuclear energy in these plans raises doubts about whether this will indeed be ‘green’ or only ‘low carbon’ hydrogen (Hydrogen Central, 2023). While Ukrainian environmentalist NGOs very much share this vision of a ‘fairer, safer and greener Ukraine’ (Ackermann, 2023), they question whether EU integration will indeed support a turn to agroecology as well as decarbonisation and decentralisation of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

In this context, the results of an International Expert Conference on the Recovery, Reconstruction and Modernisation of Ukraine, hosted by then G7 Chair Germany in Berlin in December 2022 are noteworthy. The international expert discussions also restated the possible synergies between Ukrainian and European industries in terms of decarbonising their economies:

Ukraine’s further industrial and agricultural development and modernisation must be built sustainably, leap-frogging towards a climate-neutral economy in line with European standards. Critical to this will be the greening of the agriculture and industry, including through the reform and modernisation via integration with European energy markets, and scale of investment needs which will require State, donor and the crowding-in of private investments. (G7 International Expert Conference, 2022: 21)

Furthermore, the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt/UBA) argues that

[i]t would be a mistake, both economically and ecologically, to use the reconstruction program to promote fossil fuel investments and infrastructure or methods of production and consumption harmful to the environment that will become stranded investments in a few years’ time. (2022: 13)

Hydrogen production is mentioned as a potential means to achieve a sustainable recovery especially in difficult to decarbonise industries, such as steel, aluminium or fertiliser production (German Environment Agency, 2022: 20).

Indeed, in February 2023, Ukraine and the EU launched a strategic partnership in hydrogen and biomethane production, trade, transportation, storage and use of renewable gases (State Agency on Energy Efficiency and Energy Saving of Ukraine, 2023). Hydrogen Europe, an association representing the interests of the hydrogen industries in Europe and Ukraine, had presented its own ‘Timmermanns Recovery Plan’, named after the then-Vice-President of the European Commission, responsible for the EU Green Deal and climate action. In their discussion paper, the industry representatives argued that Ukraine is a

promising supply area of hydrogen and it’s well connected to Europe by its large natural gas pipeline system that can be repurposed to transport hydrogen to central Europe. The initiative will create a hydrogen highway and Ukraine will be an integral part of it. (Hydrogen Europe, 2023)

The industry association advises scaling up wind and solar for hydrogen production but also plans to use around 30% of Ukraine’s nuclear capacity for hydrogen production.

4.2. A clean cut with Soviet fossil legacies

Second, all recovery plans very ambitiously describe a clear break with the Russian–Soviet colonial legacy and fossil-fuelled economic model. This makes sense politically but it will have to be seen how such a fundamental reorientation and restructuring of the economy can be planned and executed, especially as the war continues.

For example, at the large international Ukraine Recovery Conference in July 2022 donors agreed that the final of seven guiding principles of the Lugano Declaration should be sustainability: ‘The recovery process has to rebuild Ukraine in a sustainable manner aligned with the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development and the Paris Agreement, integrating social, economic and environmental dimensions including green transition’ (Lugano Declaration, 2022). Around the same time, the OECD also pushed for a green recovery of the Ukrainian economy: ‘post-war “green” reconstruction should not be seen as a desirable but optional “extra,” but as an economic necessity for a fundamental transformation of Ukraine towards a green and net-zero economy’ (2022: 6). Thus, the economic recovery of Ukraine ‘should cover not just the areas most affected by war, but the entire territory of Ukraine’ (OECD, 2022: 6).

4.3. Participatory and inclusive recovery

And third, to truly move beyond the Soviet legacy of central planning and centre–periphery relations, several international organisations and observers, for example, the OECD, the G7 Expert conference as well as the German Environment Agency, stressed explicitly how important institutional reforms towards place-based regional development and the decentralisation of political power are to the overall success of the green recovery ambition.

According to the OECD, for example, the recovery needs to be built on the political reforms of the 2010s by reinforcing regional and municipal governance through place-based regional development as well as a decentralisation of powers and responsibilities down to municipalities (OECD, 2022). The G7 international expert groups also emphasised that institutional decentralisation was ‘one of the biggest successes of recent reforms in Ukraine, and became the backbone of the resistance to Russian aggression. Reconstruction efforts should emphasise the critical role of local communities, mayors, councils, local businesses, and civil society’ (G7 International Expert Conference, 2022: 15) and they clearly addressed what a complete overhaul of Ukraine’s economy entails:

To truly reorient Ukraine’s economy from East to West through future-proof and a green industrial strategy, global integration and the accession to the EU, and crowding-in sustainable investment flows, it is necessary to thoroughly shed the baggage of historical Soviet experiments in industrial policy and planning. (G7 International Expert Conference, 2022: 20)

In an open letter to the EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen from February 2023, a number of international and Ukrainian environmental NGOs called on ‘the European Union to support civil society engagement and incorporation of green principles into the Ukraine reconstruction process, which will go hand in hand with the country’s EU accession’ (Ecoaction, 2023a). The undersigned call for a ‘more systematic, transparent, and participatory’ recovery plan and warn that some of the Lugano projects such as small modular nuclear reactors or the use of peat and wood as electricity generation as well as the plans for the recovery of the forestry, agriculture and hydropower sectors may lead to environmental destruction.

Most prominently, the letter critiques the fact that environmental protection is singled out as its issue area under the responsibility of the Ministry for the Environment, rather than being integrated as a cross-cutting issue into all other sectors as well. Furthermore, the NGOs complain that civil society has not been included in the preparations for the National Recovery Plan and they demand civil society representatives to also be included in the steering committee of the ‘Ukraine reconstruction platform’ as ‘[c]ivil society is best placed to provide the checks and balances for programming, financing and implementing the reconstruction in Ukraine’.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example, has ‘shattered the dominant neoliberal agricultural system and created opportunities to challenge it’ (Mamonova, 2023: 61). Ukrainian activist networks for food sovereignty have since started to lobby the Ukrainian government directly but also indirectly through the European Union by arguing that ‘curbing the development of agroholdings and transforming the Ukrainian agricultural system should be the requirements for Ukraine’s integration into the EU’ (Mamonova, 2023: 61). This conflict over land rights and the future trajectory of Ukrainian agriculture is poised to come to the fore at the moment when hostilities end eventually:

…our children, our boys will return from the front. We will win [the war] and our boys will return. And then we [farmers] will make everything work. We will defend our rights and the future. Will it be easy? I do not think so. The big feudal lords will not leave without a fight. But we know how to fight! (Cited in Mamonova, 2023: 63)

It is in this local context that the following section will focus, by exploring how and under what conditions environmental cooperation, recovery and remediation efforts might eventually support local peacebuilding instead of leading to further conflict. As these environmental damages and risks will have to be managed and repaired, environmental initiatives also might offer some chance of fostering cooperation and more peaceful relations in Ukraine, between internally displaced peoples and their host communities, in oblasts at the front and the embattled Donbas region and (eventually at some point in the future) even between Ukrainians and Russians.

5. The promises and pitfalls of environmental peacebuilding in Ukraine

After first describing some of the major war-related environmental impacts in the following, we explore potential risks and opportunities of environmental initiatives for the support of local peacebuilding in Ukraine. The concrete examples discussed in this section also illustrate what we propose as a critical problem-solving approach: a ‘next best’-prioritisation of policy options that is sensitive to power structures – historical, economic, but also with regard to gender – and orientated towards an ecologically, politically and economically sustainable post-conflict recovery.

5.1. The environmental toll of the Russian war

The environmental destruction and slow violence caused by the Russian war are in many regards extraordinary. The comprehensive and frequent use of artillery in the war has not been seen anywhere in the world since the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, giving a new boost to the industrial production of arms and materials (Ismay & Lipton, 2023). The centre of much fighting since 2014, the once heavily industrialised Donbas region has been significantly destroyed and polluted (Zwijnenburg, 2017) with toxic rivers and soil posing health risks for humans and nature for years to come. Even before the 2022 invasion, the suspended management of old coal mines in the Donbas since 2014 has risked their uncontrolled flooding and subsequent contamination of groundwater as well as soil erosion and infrastructure damage (CEOBS, 2020). Around 20% of Ukraine’s nature reserves and national parks have been affected, irreparably destroying the habitats of several endangered species (Cundy, 2022), with many protected areas now under Russian occupational control (Radio Free Europe, 2022). While occupying less than 6% of Europe’s area, Ukraine possesses 35% of its biodiversity (Convention on Biological Diversity, 2023).

A map by the Ukrainian environmental NGO, Ecoaction (2023b), which tracks reported environmental damages, shows that the main environmental damages are no longer only in the Donbas region, but much more widespread in regions that have seen heavy fighting since February 2022, as well as places where extensive earthworks have been undertaken through the building of trenches and defence lines: Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, Zaporizhia, Kherson, as well as Kyiv and Sumy Oblasts. Many of these regions form Ukraine’s agricultural heartland, which is home to around 25% of the chernozem or ‘black soil’, the most fertile soil on Earth. Ukraine is one of the world’s top agricultural producers, especially of barley, maize and wheat (European Council, 2023) with agricultural products making up 41% of the country’s exports in 2021 (US Department of Agriculture, 2022) of which almost all were exported via the Black Sea (US International Trade Administration, 2023). When the country’s agricultural production and exports were significantly disrupted because of the Russian invasion in early 2022, it also affected global food security, ultimately leading to the UN-brokered Black Sea Grain initiative.

The Russian war against Ukraine has had environmental consequences beyond Ukraine, however. The global food crisis and the European energy crisis caused by the Russian war of aggression, for example, were both made worse by historic drought and resulting low river levels in the summer of 2022 (Bleiker, 2022). In Italy, for example, the Po River dried up, resulting in crop losses for the food industry and France’s nuclear power plant operators faced a scarcity of cooling water. These compounding crises show the danger of risk cascades and the complicated political challenges in a climate-changed world (see also He et al., 2024; Medina et al., 2024; Šedová et al., 2024). The European Commission went so far as to call agriculture a security issue (Fortuna & Foote, 2022) and there has been mounting pressure to weaken or delay European agricultural reforms aimed at sustainability to prioritise food production output over environmental standards (Dahm, 2022; Mamonova, 2022).

With regard to greenhouse gas emissions, it is not clear how the war will affect the decarbonisation of the world economy in the long term. Globally, the economic downturn resulting from the war and the Inflation Reduction Act by US President Biden, which aimed at encouraging green investments, are likely to have helped some greenhouse gas emissions in the short term (Lawson, 2023). First initiatives have been trying to measure the carbon impact of the war in Ukraine and came to the assessment that after 9 months of fighting around 50% of the overall war-related emissions (estimated to be around 97 Mt of CO₂ equivalents) have been related to the reconstruction of destroyed civilian infrastructure, just under 25% were related to emissions caused by fires, particularly from burning forests, while the leakages from the sabotaged Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines (irrespective of who is responsible for it) account for 15% and warfare-related emissions, from transport and ammunition, account for around 9% of overall war-related emissions (Initiative on GHG accounting of war, 2022).

The carbon impact assessment looked at preparatory war measures as well as warfare and also included reconstruction. The large-scale destruction of civil infrastructure targeted through Russian missiles and drones during the winter months of 2022 to 2023 has not yet been included in this assessment though. Additionally, the already existing Ukrainian renewable energy infrastructure was dealt a serious blow since the large-scale invasion in February 2022. The country appears to have ‘lost about 90% of wind capacity, which is on occupied territory, and about 30% of solar’ (Dickie & James, 2022). Moreover, because of the soil pollution and minefields in many parts of the agricultural heartland of Ukraine and especially since the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and its long-term consequences for irrigation and agriculture in Ukraine’s South, Ukraine’s future as a major agricultural exporter seems in question. A working paper by the Kyiv School of Economics estimates that it may take ‘as long as 20 years for Ukraine to regain its strength in agriculture’ (Bogonos, 2023: 7).

This very brief overview of major war-related environmental impacts in Ukraine and beyond provides a rough roadmap for which environmental issues will have to be managed going forward: the energy- and carbon-intensive rebuilding of infrastructures and buildings, the remediation of polluted and mined agricultural land, as well as the restoration of protected ecosystems. In the following, we discuss a few actual and potential environmental initiatives, exploring what benefits and risks local environmental peacebuilding efforts might have while also keeping in mind the past and potentially new asymmetries between Ukraine and the outside world with regard to the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens.

5.2. On the ground: Potentials and limits of local environmental peacebuilding

According to Krampe et al.’s (2021), there are three causal mechanisms distilled from the environmental peacebuilding literature where environmental initiatives can support peacebuilding efforts. First, the diffusion of transnational norms, where the introduction of environmental and other good governance norms supports human empowerment and strengthens civil society. Second, state service provision, where the provision of access to public services addresses the instrumental needs of communities, thereby strengthening their belief in the state. Third, the contact hypothesis, whereby the facilitation of intergroup cooperation reduces bias and prejudice.

First, the great external support Ukraine received during the war must be continued after the war in the context of reconstruction with a focus on environmental damage. In addition to financial assistance, this support must also include the transfer of knowledge. At the same time, this knowledge must be adapted and made effective for the Ukrainian context by local actors; the agency, as research on diffusion processes shows, must lie with the actors on the ground, who have crucial experience and expertise (Nalbo, 2024; Zimmermann, 2016). This clearly relates to the first causal mechanism: the diffusion of transnational norms. These local initiatives should be supported from outside by international organisations and transnational networks without compromising their independence. Of great importance are also war refugees who decide to return to Ukraine at some point, most of which are women and children. They have, in the best case, knowledge and networks that they can contribute to ecological reconstruction.

A major area where the diffusion of transnational norms is set to play a major role in the reconstruction of Ukraine is that of rebuilding Ukrainian cities in a sustainable way. In February 2023, the European Commission already promised 7 million euros for the green development of Ukrainian cities through the Phoenix Initiative, which aims at connecting Ukrainian cities and municipalities with like-minded EU cities (European Commission, 2023). The initiative combines funding from the Horizon Europe Mission for Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities and the LIFE Programme, and envisions to introduce Ukrainian cities as well as architects to the New European Bauhaus community in the rest of Europe, which ‘calls on all of us to imagine and build together a sustainable and inclusive future that is beautiful for our eyes, minds, and souls’ (New European Bauhaus, 2023).

The Ukrainian Environment Minister, Ruslan Strilets, welcomed the Phoenix Initiative by the EU: ‘This initiative is an opportunity not only to understand what is needed to rebuild Ukraine, but also to unify approaches. First of all, in terms of minimizing the environmental impact during the reconstruction of our cities’ (The Odessa Journal, 2023). Strilets’ statement shows the potential as well as the risks of this EU initiative, however, when he speaks of unifying approaches: it is good that the initiative targets Ukrainian cities and municipalities directly and seeks to nurture links between EU and Ukrainian city administrations. If the sustainable rebuilding of Ukrainian cities is supposed to support local peacebuilding efforts on the community level, however, it is important that local actors and communities maintain ownership and leadership within the New European Bauhaus community and subsequent funding rounds. European actors, whether they are from the EU Commission, a European mayoral office or well-meaning European architecture firms, will have to keep in mind that they are often, consciously or not, socialising agents with regard to what counts as ‘sustainable’. This demands a great level of self-reflexivity and an openness to mutual learning.

Furthermore, some existing transnational networks between Ukraine and other European countries are already shaping the resilience and rebuilding of Ukrainian communities from the ground up. The Global Ecovillage Network, for example, aims at building ecovillages as ‘an intentional, traditional or urban community that is consciously designed through locally owned, participatory processes in all four areas of regeneration (social, culture, ecology and economy) to regenerate their social and natural environments’ (Global Ecovillage Network, 2023). In the immediate aftermath of the February 2022 invasion, many ecovillages throughout Ukraine and the rest of Europe linked up online to form a ‘Green road’ for war refugees to shelter or leave the country, as well as to organise logistics of much-needed goods (Volkova, 2022). It will be a crucial challenge for the EU to ensure that the knowledge and capital flowing into Ukraine because of the Phoenix initiative is responsive to and supportive of such local initiatives and already existing successful community-building projects.

Second, if international–local cooperation succeeds in the way that has just been outlined, this will also provide an important impulse for the state framework conditions of ecological reconstruction in Ukraine. This relates to the second causal mechanism of state service provision. On the one hand, the orientation towards international standards and organisations result in financial resources and political frameworks for reconstruction. On the other hand, local structures are directly strengthened and integrated into the process. These two pillars should be the basis for state service provision.

In this context, specific challenges and risks that concern the engagement of affected persons and civil society organisations have to be considered. As Sändig et al. point out, the engagement of organisations of affected people in particular has a high legitimacy and a high potential for disruptive solutions. At the same time, however, the capacities of these groups are very limited and the risk of co-optation by international actors aiming to exploit the potential for legitimacy is high (Sändig et al., 2018). The limited capacities of affected actors and civil society organisations can lead to dependencies that can have negative consequences. As a consequence, organisations are forced to behave like market actors in the reconstruction market described above to gain access to funding from international organisations. This can also lead to the instrumentalisation of the groups, which compromises their altruistic goals (Bob, 2010). Furthermore, as Johnson (2022: 765) has cautioned, bottom-up approaches to environmental peacebuilding often do not ‘scale up’ easily and local-level capacity building can even undermine peacebuilding efforts if state actors are incapable or unwilling to integrate these institutions, which, in turn, can undermine the perceived state legitimacy.

Against the background of the recommendation to self-reflexively design diffusion and state provision, the following risks identified in the environmental peacebuilding literature should also be considered. According to Ide (2020), peacebuilding efforts can be enhanced and supported by addressing environmental issues, but only if certain conditions, such as high environmental attention, internal political stability as well as ongoing processes of reconciliation, are present. Currently, it looks like there is much attention to environmental matters as well as reasonably stable political support for the Ukrainian government but it is unclear how this will develop in the future and how and when processes of reconciliation between combatants will be possible. These conditions make clear that all high ambitions for environmental peacebuilding successes should be approached with a degree of caution.

This last aspect is why it is too early to explore the final of Krampe et al.’s causal mechanisms, the contact hypothesis, whereby the facilitation of intergroup cooperation reduces bias and prejudice. The war, which is still ongoing, has created a situation in which for a long time neither cooperative action between the parties to the conflict nor between the European countries and Russia seems possible. Nevertheless, the depoliticised framework of environmental issues — where common interests are obvious and which can be reduced to arguments about technical issues – may help to re-establish relations at some point. Moreover, there is a major trade-off between a rapid economic recovery on the scale needed for the Ukrainian economy and the need to restore and regenerate land and ecosystems. For example, President Zelenskyy (2022a) has referred to the potential of Ukraine becoming ‘a green energy hub for Europe (…) capable of replacing dirty Russian energy resources’ and promised a national recovery plan that is guided by principles such as ‘maximum compliance with environmental standards; maximum use of “green” technologies’ (Zelenskyy, 2022b).

There is a further problem of how to put a value on the environmental destruction. The Ukrainian government has been gathering data on the financial cost of the widespread environmental damages to eventually sue Russia for compensation through inspectors, satellite data as well as citizens documenting the damage and environmental risks on the publicly available EcoZagroza platform. Ukrainian environmental NGOs support this effort but have critiqued the government’s focus on the monetary value of the damages and less so on the ecological destruction itself (CEOBS, 2022). Many civil society actors also argue that ‘the war should be a turning point that facilitates Ukraine’s transition away from its industrial past, leaving it with stronger environmental governance and more sustainable development’ (CEOBS, 2022). Whether and how these recovery plans will be realised is to be seen but Ukrainian environmentalists fear that economic priorities will continue to prevail over systematic conservation efforts (UNCG, 2022). In the case of the Irpin River, for example, whose flooding stopped Russian advances on Kyiv in spring 2022, environmentalists argued that it should be ecologically restored instead of being built over with large construction projects, as was planned before the invasion (Mundy, 2022).

Drawing on the environmental peacebuilding literature against the backdrop of Ukrainian environmental insecurities caused by the war, it becomes clear that there are major trade-offs between a quick economic recovery and a planned sustainable rebuild, as well as between international support through knowledge and capital, and local initiatives and experiences. In light of the above discussion of the promises and pitfalls of environmental peacebuilding, it is equally clear that to strike the right balance between these competing priorities, it will be crucial for a sustainable peace in Ukraine that local communities and civil society will have to be centred and listened to. Ensuring that they have a say and stake in the rebuilding of their country is a responsibility for the Ukrainian government as well as for the European Union alike.

6. Conclusions: Centring local communities and Ukrainian civil society for sustainable peace and recovery

In addition to direct human suffering, the Russia–Ukraine war is causing environmental damage on a scale that will burden future generations for a long time to come. If reconstruction is already being considered and plans are being developed now – when an end to the war is not in sight – repairing the environmental damage is one of the central challenges. This challenge has been recognised, the slow violence of environmental damage is clearly named and a green recovery is part of international reconstruction discussions as well. It is therefore all the more important to point now to challenges to a green and sustainable recovery of Ukraine that are not technical but political, which must also be considered to promote sustainable peace and avoid new asymmetries and conflicts.

The article has endeavoured to use, complement and adapt the rich existing research knowledge that is important both for situating the history of externally caused environmental damage in Ukraine and for developing perspectives on environmental peacebuilding. This is, on the one hand, the perspective of (international) political ecology, with which the larger historical and imperial contexts of environmental exploitation in Ukraine can be worked out. This perspective accentuates the risk that new asymmetries can arise through internationally supported reconstruction, which must be avoided. On the other hand, and following systematically from this, the literature on environmental peacebuilding points to the potentials for addressing these risks. Derived from the lessons on the dark side of environmental peacebuilding, local actors in particular need to be strengthened in the implementation of green reconstruction efforts that are as independent as possible and oriented towards local contexts while the Ukrainian government should work towards integrating these local community-based capabilities into appropriate state structures.

Environmental insecurities and the slow violence stemming from them amplify the human toll and complicate the post-conflict recovery, and any sustainable peace in Ukraine will have to address these direct and indirect environmental risks very clearly. Environmental remediation and recovery initiatives can support local peacebuilding under certain conditions if local stakeholders are critically involved and in the lead. It will also be important to include those local stakeholders with less influence, especially refugees, of which most are women. The European Union and other partners for the Ukrainian economic recovery will need to be aware of the trade-offs between a quick economic recovery, which is in Ukraine’s interests because the country will be less dependent on Western donors and Western public opinion, and the risks of perpetuating unjust and unsustainable economic and political structures with Ukraine, especially in the context of the European Green Deal, which would not lead to a politically and environmentally sustainable peace. After all, Ukraine’s economic recovery is a real test of how to rebuild a war-torn country and its economy in support of climate mitigation and adaptation goals.

Through this analysis, the article accomplishes two things. First, we used and adapted existing research to help manage the environmental challenges that will shape Ukrainian recovery, whether on the local or the European level. Second, we can illustrate the complementary value of the (internal) political ecology and environmental peacebuilding approaches for critical problem-solving purposes. While the environmental peacebuilding scholarship provides some very practical insights into the management of environmental risks and resources, a political ecology approach can ensure that these practices are appropriate in a given historical, political and cultural context, allowing for a ‘next best’ prioritisation of policy options in light of a larger history of power as well as in terms of an ecologically sustainably economic recovery. This is a fruitful starting point for future research that is interested in both advancing the empirical connections between environmental power asymmetries and peacebuilding and in theory building for the nexus of environmental change and conflict.