Ecocide in Ukraine

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the environmental consequences of the war have become an increasingly urgent subject of scientific research, journalism, public debate and international law. Damage to forests, rivers, soils, protected areas, agricultural landscapes, industrial sites and critical infrastructure has raised important questions about how environmental harm caused by warfare can be documented, understood, communicated and ultimately addressed. Moving between field observations, ecological data, images and personal experience, they will consider how war transforms landscapes, how environmental loss can be documented across different disciplines, and how researchers and journalists can communicate complex ecological consequences without reducing them to statistics or isolated images. 

Brendan Hoffman is an American documentary photographer and journalist whose recent focus has been the intersection of armed conflict and the environment. From 2014 to 2026, Brendan was based in Kyiv, Ukraine, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a 2018-19 Fulbright Scholar in Ukraine, and his photographs have been exhibited in museums, galleries, educational institutions and festivals across Europe, Asia and the United States. Last year he published a major front-page story in The New York Times on the environmental impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Nataliia Yaroshenko, Ph.D. in ecology, is a Ukrainian ecologist, researcher and educator whose work focuses on the environmental consequences of war, biodiversity conservation and environmental education. She is currently a Fulbright researcher at the University at Buffalo, where she studies and communicates the ecological impacts of Russia’s war against Ukraine. She is also the author of enWAR_mental, an educational comic exploring the environmental consequences of Russian war against Ukraine.