: The Environmental Health Risks of War in a Highly Industrialized Country Like Ukraine #WorldNEWS During a lull between air raid warnings earlier this month, Iryna Nikolaieva sat in a stairwell of a

The Environmental Health Risks of War in a Highly Industrialized Country Like Ukraine #WorldNEWS
During a lull between air raid warnings earlier this month, Iryna Nikolaieva sat in a stairwell of a Kyiv bomb shelter where she had been living for three days and called engineers at two chemical plants near the front lines in the country’s east. Nikolaiva worked as an expert on hazardous waste, and she worried that fighting near the facilities could damage earthen dams holding back hundreds of thousands of tons of chemical sludge, setting off a catastrophic accident.
A manager at one site picked up and said that the situation was under control. The chief engineer of the other—a chemical processing facility with waste facilities less than two miles from the front line near the town of Toresk—said he had no idea how the storage sites were holding up. “They said they could not get there because of active hostilities,” says Nikolaieva, speaking from Warsaw, where she fled after nine days living in the bomb shelter with her son, his girlfriend, and hundreds of other Kyiv residents. “It’s not safe for people to go there to check. ”
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Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine has already caused unimaginable suffering, with millions of civilians forced to flee their homes, and thousands of others trapped under Russian shelling in cities like Mariupol. The fighting is also creating new environmental hazards, which threaten to add to the war’s human cost. Some of those environmental risks, like a release of radiation from one of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, could have immediate and devastating consequences. Others, like carcinogenic dust from bombed buildings, are long term threats, with effects likely to reverberate for years and decades after fighting stops.
“Civilians depend on their immediate surroundings and the environment,” says Richard Pearshouse, the director of the environment and human rights division of Human Rights Watch. “Its no longer sufficient to think of the environment as an afterthought to conflict. ”
Read more: Ukraine Must Be the Last War of the Age of Impunity
All wars create devastating environmental threats for civilians, but the fighting in Ukraine could lead to particularly disastrous environmental consequences because the country is so heavily industrialized, particularly in the east, considered to be Ukraine’s industrial heartland. Much of that infrastructure—steel plants in the eastern Donets Basin, chemical facilities near cities like Kyiv and Korosten, and weapons factories, including facilities to produce intercontinental ballistic missiles—was developed in the Soviet era, with some having fallen into disrepair or mismanagement in recent years.

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