Editor’s note: Mass media news about war raises concerns about death, injury, and refuge of humans, the war on nature is rarely highlighted. But warfare always means ecocide on a large scale and wildlife and nature often take more time to recover than it is capable of. In Ukraine, 80% of wildlife is already on the brink of extinction, with the Russian aggression even more species and individual animals are getting lost. Therefore it’s a relief to have organisations like UAnimals who rescue pets and wildlife in emergency situations and raise international awareness about the destruction in nature and national parks.
The Ottawa Convention also referred to as the “Mine Ban Treaty,” prohibits the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer of anti-personnel landmines (APLs). Some key current and past producers and users of landmines, including the United States, China, India, Pakistan, and Russia, have not signed the treaty.
By John R. Platt/The Revelator
For Ukrainian activists, rescuing the dogs of war — not to mention the cats, swans, bats, bears and other wildlife — often means putting their own lives on the line.
Saving Ukraine’s injured and displaced animals during wartime often means seeing the worst elements of Russian cruelty.
“When a territory is liberated, our team goes there and we speak with the people who survived the occupation,” says Olga Chevhanyuk, chief operating officer of UAnimals, Ukraine’s largest animal-rights organization. “And each time we hear that when the Russians entered the town, they started shooting animals for fun, starting with dogs just walking the streets and ending with huge farms and shelters. Sometimes it’s probably a matter of manipulation, getting people scared. But mostly it’s no reason at all, just because they can.”
Originally founded to oppose inhumane conditions in circuses, the nonprofit UAnimals has shifted its mission to rescuing and caring for domestic animals and wildlife devastated by Russian aggression.
Working with local volunteers and shelters, they’ve helped tens of thousands of animals since the war began a year ago, including dogs and cats, horses, deer, swans, birds of prey and bats — even large predators like bears. In January alone they rescued more than 9,600 animals, provided food and medicine to thousands more, rebuilt shelters, and helped fund operations throughout the country.
They’ve also found themselves purchasing supplies not traditionally used in animal rescues.
“Before the war, you never think of buying helmets for your team,” Chevhanyuk says.
And then there’s the human toll: The nonprofit has contracted with psychologists to provide on-demand assistance to its team in the field. “So now they can have a session with the psychologist when they’re overwhelmed,” she says.
But this is all about saving more than individual animal lives and human minds. It’s about saving the soul of a country.
A Crime Against Nature
UAnimals has started calling the Russian war an ecocide — the deliberate destruction of the natural environment.
“Nowadays 20% of Ukraine’s nature conservation areas are affected by war,” Chevhanyuk says. “Russians occupy eight national reserves and 12 national parks, and some of the national parks are land-mined. Holy Mountains National Park is 80% destroyed. Some of them are destroyed 100%, meaning there are no plants, no animals, and no buildings which people use to heal animals. The land is littered with remains of destroyed objects, like tons of oil and burned products.”
Landmines are among the worst problems. They kill humans and animals indiscriminately, start fires, and will take years to mitigate. About 62,000 square miles of Ukraine may be contaminated with landmines. “This is greater than the size of Illinois,” according to information provided by a U.S. State Department official. “The United States is investing $91.5 million over the coming year to help the government of Ukraine address the urgent humanitarian challenges posed by explosive remnants of war created by Russia’s invasion.”
Cleaning up the pollution will require even more funding and effort. The war has caused at least $37 billion in environmental damage, a Ukrainian NGO said in November.
UAnimals predicts it could take more than a decade to repair the damage, but Ukraine’s wildlife doesn’t have that much time. “More than 80 species of animals in our country are on the verge of extinction and may completely cease to exist due to Russian aggression,” Chevhanyuk says. “Some of them are the steppe eagle, black stork, brown bear, Eurasian lynx, barn owl and eared hedgehog.”
While many of these species also exist in other countries, Chevhanyuk says wildlife has been an important element of Ukrainian folksongs, art and symbology — the very fabric of its culture — for centuries. “Being humane and treating animals as something really important and equal — this is one of the things which differs us a lot from Russians. And that’s, I believe, a part of our future victory.”
Moving Forward
UAnimals continues to ramp up its fundraising and recovery efforts while expanding its network of shelters outside the country — a necessary step, as Ukrainian shelters and reserves are rapidly filling to capacity with animals too wounded ever to be released back into the wild.
“We have big shelters for bears, for example,” Chevhanyuk says, “but they are already full. I’m afraid that if something happens, we’ll need to bring these animals abroad. So we are very grateful to all our partners in different countries because there’s a big need right now.”
The organization is also tapping back into its activist roots to bring international attention to conditions in Ukraine. In February they organized Stop Ecocide Ukraine rallies in four U.S. cities — Atlanta, Austin, New York and San Antonio — that each attracted hundreds of people.
In a way, this is a return to form. “We used to create huge animal-rights marches in 30 Ukrainian cities every September,” Chevhanyuk says. “But since the war started, we are more focused on the emergency.”
And the international community has started to take notice. Last month the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a resolution to “build and consolidate a legal framework for the enhanced protection of the environment in armed conflicts” — steps that support establishing ecocide as a new international crime.
“From a legal perspective, this is really encouraging,” says Jojo Mehta, cofounder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International, “because if you put severe harm to the living world on the same level as severe harm to people, if you say ecocide is as bad, wrong and dangerous as genocide, you’re creating a mental rebalance.”
It could still take years for ecocide to become international law. Meanwhile, the destruction of Ukraine continues, as do recovery efforts.
“If our team knows there is an animal to rescue,” Chevhanyuk says, “they will go in.”
More Information here: UAnimals
This article is published under CC BY-NC-SA
Photo by Balkhovitin/Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-NC-SA
This article would be a lot better if it did not take such a partisan position. It comes across as pro-Ukrainian propaganda trying to make the reader assume Russia, by invading Ukraine, is to blame for the effects on wildlife when in fact, the blame should be shared equally by both sides because if the Ukrainian government would only just surrender there would be no more war and the problem would be over.
Taking a human-centered politicized position that one side is in the ”right” and the other is in the ”wrong” is evading the reality that the effects on nature are far more important in the long run than any political ideology or nationalistic desires.
100 years from now it will not matter if some areas became part of ”Russia” or remained part of ”Ukraine” even if either of those artificial entities still exist, but a species that became extinct from the fighing will still be extinct.
As we used to say in our local Earth First! chapter, war is bad for all species. Tolkien wrote about how ecologically devastating war is, and that was about pre-industrial war. You can square the amount of harm for industrial war.
I’ll take Tzindaro’s comment a bit further: While I’m unequivocally anti-war and therefore oppose the Russian invasion, this is all the fault of the U.S. The CIA used Ukrainian Nazis* to overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014 and install a U.S. puppet. The ethnic Russians living in eastern Ukraine, known as the Donbas, refused to accept the U.S. puppet as their leader, because no one voted for him. In response, the Azov Batallian, one group of these Nazis, started attacking and killing those ethnic Russians, who then asked Russia for help. While I don’t excuse Russia for invading, it was certainly provoked by the U.S., and the U.S. is the ultimate cause of this problem. This should not be surprising to anyone who understands geopolitics, because the U.S. is the evil empire on this planet. This is not to say that the U.S. is the only problem, but it’s by far the biggest one.
DGR should do some research before commenting on issues outside of its bailiwick. As Tzindaro said, some of the statements here read like U.S./Ukraine propaganda. You have to go well outside mainstream/corporate/establishment media, which is nothing more than propaganda, to find anything approaching the truth in these matters, and it sounds like DGR is just parroting that propaganda.
* Some or all of the Nazis in Ukraine are “neo-Nazis,” but I make no differentiation between them and literal Nazis and use the term “Nazis” to describe both.
The American war machine is the largest single polluter in the world, with it’s more than 5,000 planes, nuclear-powered ships, and use of used nuclear reactor fuel rods in artilery shells among many other attacks on the life-suport systems of this planet. Yet I have seen no sign of protests by environmental activists at military bases, no protests against the companies that make military equipment for the armed services, and no refusal to pay taxes that suport the existence of this enemy of the earth. Why?
A mass tax refusal movement of people refusing to donate money to the government until it significantly reduces it’s environmental footprint might force the abandonment of at least some of the environmentally destructive practices of the American military regime. At the very least it would be worth a try.
So here is a suggestion. Set up an on-line website with a pledge people could sign promising not to pay any Federal taxes until certain specific environmentally destructive practices are ended or at least significantly reduced.
If even only a few thousand Americans signed it it would be impossible for the U.S. regime to prosecute them all for tax evasion. There are plenty of people willing to undergo prosecution for other kinds of protests, so why not try something more likely to have a real effect in putting presure on the worst of the environmental polluters, the U.S. armed forces?
To avoid censorship the site could be hosted in some country such as Iran, Cuba, or Russia where the government would not obey an American order to take it down.