Ukrainians Are Accusing Russia of Ecocide. What Does That Mean?

The rupture of a major dam in southern Ukraine has displaced the Dnipro River, killed an unknown number of people, and left many Ukrainians homeless. Who destroyed the dam and why is still not fully clear, although growing evidence points to deliberate Russian action. As the shockwaves of Tuesday’s Nova Kakhovka explosion wane, Ukraine is left reckoning with the damage—and trying to find words for the crime.

“Brutal ecocide,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted on Tuesday in reference to the explosion, also calling it an act of “Russian aggression,” a “war crime,” and “an act of terrorism.” Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office has launched an ecocide probe into the effects of the dam’s destruction, and climate activist Greta Thunberg is using the same term to describe the event. This is not the first time Ukrainians have used the term to describe Russian actions: Ecocide gained traction earlier this year when Ukraine hosted a panel on “prosecuting environmental war crimes” at the United for Justice conference in March.

But what does ecocide mean? A combination of “ecology” and “genocide,” the term packs a punch. By using it to call attention to wartime environmental devastation, Ukrainians are reviving a rhetorical strategy that was birthed in opposition to the Vietnam War. It has, however, no widely accepted legal meaning—although some advocates aspire to make it otherwise.

American bioethicist Arthur Galston coined the term in a 1970 plea to end the use of Agent Orange, an herbicide used by U.S. troops in Vietnam to eliminate forest cover and crops, on the grounds that it was causing widespread environmental destruction—or ecocide. In 1971, Foreign Affairs ran a piece under the title “Ecocide and the Geneva Protocol” weighing the strategic advantages of Agent Orange against its devastating environmental impact, framed as a contribution to the debate on whether the United States should ratify measures banning biochemical weapons.

“Ecocide is the willful destruction of ecology—of the environment—as a weapon of war,” said David Zierler, a historian of science and author of The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think About the Environment (University of Georgia Press, 2011).

Outside of a wartime context, the term is popular within the environmental movement as a tool for prosecuting corporate oil spillers and other actors who cause widespread environmental destruction. Domestic laws aimed at protecting the environment are not new, and some post-Soviet states—with histories of government-led ecological destruction—have them, though they don’t always use that term.

While ecocide laws are rare, it’s possible that it could eventually have international legal force within the specific context of war. By citing it in the same beat as “war crime” and “aggression,” Zelensky’s tweet tied the term to a conceptually and legally complex framework and showcased his high hopes that this word might become a tool for justice.

It is also liable to prosecution under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the document that lays out the definition and prosecution guardrails for crimes that can be tried under international law, including genocide, crimes against humanity, the crime of aggression, and war crimes.

Although these laws have only been in effect since 2002, Marwa Daoudy, an associate professor of international relations at Georgetown University, traces the rising awareness of environmental destruction to Iraq’s actions during the Gulf War. “Since then, there’s been a realization that these acts should not be adopted by states in situations of warfare,” she said. “So this is why it’s seen as a turning point.”

Since disproportionate attack is a type of war crime and environmental damage is a type of disproportionate attack, wartime environmental damage brought on by armed forces can be prosecuted under the Rome Statute. There is even a clause that explicitly refers to it: Article 8, Section 2, point b (iv), which mentions “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.”

Much of the environmental destruction carried out by Russian forces in Ukraine, including the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam, can be prosecuted by Article 8, according to two war crimes experts consulted by Foreign Policy.

“That’s the definition at the moment, which I would have thought is capable of being levied at Russian military commanders,” said Geoffrey Robertson, a former United Nations war crimes judge. “It’s there already.”

“Suggesting that attacks which cause huge damage to the environment is a war crime is obviously an important message to be sending as the prosecutor,” said Andrew Clapham, a former special representative of the U.N. secretary-general in Iraq and the author of War (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Human Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2007).

So what’s the legal need for letting ecocide be its own separate crime under international law?

Article 8 requires the prosecution to prove “a lot of things,” Robertson said. If it becomes too hard to prove the case, some might come to say that that definition is not sufficient, which could suggest the need for a new concept.

Efforts to recognize ecocide as a crime under the Rome Statute are being led by the Stop Ecocide Foundation, an organization founded in 2019 that proposed to expand the statute to include ecocide. Its proposal would eliminate the need to prove a guilty mind among perpetrators, allowing cases of negligent environmental destruction to be prosecuted as ecocide.

Amending the Rome Statute would require the approval of two-thirds of the members of the ICC during an assembly meeting. While the cogs of international law reform churn slowly, national laws are moving faster, and the popularity of the term is spreading.

Outside of wartime, ecocide as such is already a crime under both Russian and Ukrainian law. The Ukrainian prosecutor-general has the power to prosecute Russian leaders if they were to be captured and proved responsible for the collapse of the dam, said legal expert Kate Mackintosh, a member of the Stop Ecocide Foundation’s independent expert panel. Kyiv defines ecocide 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.”

The war in Ukraine has brought global awareness to wartime environmental destruction and has since spurred government bodies to support the recognition of ecocide as a criminal offense under law, and some lawyers are confident that increased public discourse can lead to the inclusion of ecocide in governments’ national laws around the world.

“I think it’s just a matter of time before it gets accepted as an international crime, and this Ukraine situation is getting the word out there and having people talk about it, which is very important for the public consciousness,” Mackintosh said.

In March, the European Parliament proposed including ecocide as an environmental crime—though not a war crime, which only the ICC has the jurisdiction to do—under EU law.

Other long-term consequences, both on people and wildlife, will be difficult to measure. “We have different, let’s say, forecasts for the consequences for the environment. … We can separate [the impacts] into two zones,” said Iryna Nikolaieva, an environmental consultant at the Dutch conflict research organization PAX for Peace. Upstream, the sudden drainage of the reservoir could rapidly change the ecosystem in a process of desertification. Downstream, alongside the damage to settlements and agriculture, the floodwaters could destabilize ecosystems and jeopardize nature reserves.

Ukraine’s environment and the people who live in it will be changed by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam for years to come. It’s the likelihood that locals were deliberately targeted, and the apparent intention to cause long-lasting harm, though, that makes Zierler, the historian of science, say this is a unique moment. “I would make the case that the destruction of the dam in Ukraine is probably the most compelling instance of ecocide since the Vietnam War,” he said.