Germany has offered to re-deploy Patriot air defence systems to NATO ally Poland.

Serhiy Tsapok surveyed the smouldering ruins of pine trees, blackened stumps as far as the eye can see that bear witness to a scorched nation.

“They’re dead now,” the weary ranger said of the trees he’d nursed for almost two decades. The 41-year-old’s daily route through the Ukrainian forests, once a joy, has become a nightmare.

“Now when I’m driving, it’s better to just stare at the road.”

The fire he fought, caused by a blast of undetermined cause, wiped out three hectares of octogenarian pine trees at the Sviati Hory national park in eastern Ukraine, according to officials there. Four-fifths of the park’s nearly 12,000 hectares have been damaged or destroyed by fires or ordnance, they said.

It’s a drop in the ocean of the damage caused by the war, which has brutalized the landscape of Ukraine and much of its 10 million hectares, or 100,000 sq km, of forest. Both Russian and Ukrainian armies blast thousands of shells at each other every day, shredding the earth in grinding combat that echoes the trench warfare of World War One.

The conflict has innovated in destruction, too.

Two videos posted in September by a unit from Ukraine’s 108th Territorial Defence brigade showed a small drone trying to flush out Russian troops by spraying a glowing, red-hot substance onto a long line of trees and setting them alight.

Reuters spoke to nearly 20 specialists in the field, including forest rangers, ecologists, demining experts and government officials, who provided a detailed picture of the ruin wrought on Ukraine’s forests by the 31-month-old war.

Russian authorities didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article.

The director of the Sviati Hory national park, Serhiy Pryimachuk, told Reuters that Russian munitions had burned vast tracts of the area, once a rare and beloved beauty spot in a heavily industrialised region.

“What we have lost is enormous,” he said.

Tending to forests is now a perilous occupation, with mines and unexploded shells hidden in the ground posing the biggest threat.

Oleksandr Polovynko, a 39-year-old ranger, nearly lost a foot after stepping on a mine while tending the forest last year. “I crawled back to the car, and drove home with one leg,” he recalled. It took him six months to return to work.

A worker carries a shovel he used to dig a firebreak to contain a forest fire near Yarova, Sviati Hory National Park, Donetsk region, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, July 29, 2024. Forest workers have been killed by landmines, booby traps and shelling during the conflict, according to environment ministry data.
| Photo Credit:
Reuters

All that remains of many forests in eastern Ukraine are fields of stripped, broken trunks. Local wildlife, including deer, boars and woodpeckers, have been badly affected by the loss of habitats, the experts said, although it is currently hard to gauge biodiversity loss in forests.

In northern Ukraine’s Chornobyl nature reserve, the pre-war population of over 100 Przewalski’s horses – a globally endangered species of wild horse – has been hit hard by the conflict, according to Oleh Lystopad, an ecologist with the ANTS advocacy group who said landmines were making it difficult to extinguish fires.

“Right now, it’s in question to what extent this species can continue to exist there,” Lystopad said.

Dense forests decimated

Protecting the environment isn’t the highest priority for a country fighting to repel an invading army in a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The damage to forests is nonetheless part of a broader trail of environmental destruction caused by the war, which could leave a bleak natural legacy for decades to come, having poisoned earth and rivers, polluted the air and left vast tracts of the country riddled with mines, according to the experts.

The conflict has compounded destruction of Ukrainian forestland by longstanding factors such as illegal logging. The damage during the war has been caused by various factors: aerial bombardment can spark large fires, while some forests near the frontline are shelled so intensively that they’re rendered a field of stumps.

The dense pine forests common to eastern Ukraine catch alight easily and have been decimated by the conflict, said Brian Milakovsky, a U.S.-based forester who until recently lived and worked in Ukraine for eight years.

The war has torn through the habitats of some unique flora such as the chalk pine, a rare subspecies of Scots pine, according to ecologists and park officials.

Milakovsky said the environmental crisis was particularly acute in Russian-held areas – nearly a fifth of Ukraine – where occupation authorities appeared to have little capacity to extinguish forest fires. He estimated about 80% of the pine forests in the eastern region of Luhansk had been destroyed.

Smoke fills the air during a forest fire outside Lyman, Donetsk region, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, July 27, 2024. The foresters interviewed said the Russians were heavily dug in, and left booby traps and tripwires behind as they retreated. On two separate occasions in Donetsk, Reuters reporters saw rangers and fire crews look on from narrow cleared paths as fires chewed their way through the mined forest undergrowth in front of them.
| Photo Credit:
Reuters

Booby traps and tripwires

About 425,000 hectares of forest across the country have been found to be contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance, an area half the size of Cyprus, according to the environment ministry.

Authorities say they still need to inspect up to 3 million hectares of forest which are or have been occupied by Russian forces and are likely riddled with mines and ordnance. The foresters interviewed said the Russians were heavily dug in, and left booby traps and tripwires behind as they retreated.

“If we want to extinguish a fire quickly, it’s impossible because the entire territory is mined,” Ruslan Strilets, who was Ukraine’s environment minister at the time of his interview in July. “There is a risk of being killed or maimed.”

Indeed, on top of serious injuries to rangers like Polovynko, 14 forest workers have been killed by landmines, booby traps and shelling during the conflict, according to environment ministry data.

On two separate occasions in Donetsk, Reuters reporters saw rangers and fire crews look on from narrow cleared paths as fires chewed their way through the mined forest undergrowth in front of them.

Reuters watched deminers from Ukraine’s State Emergencies Service methodically sweep a dirt track through forestland in Sviati Hory over the summer. Mykyta Novikov, the 24-year-old head of the squad, said the team had cleared a strip 200 metres long and eight wide over the past two days, but on the most difficult days they might only advance 5 metres.

“We’ve had days where we destroy 50 items,” he added.

Oleksandr Polovynko (left), 39, a forest ranger, and his co-worker clear a path for demining vehicles to pass, at the Sviati Hory National Park, in the Donetsk Region, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, July 27, 2024. Tending to forests is now a perilous occupation, with mines and unexploded shells hidden in the ground posing the biggest threat. Polovynko nearly lost a foot after stepping on a mine while tending the forest last year. “I crawled back to the car, and drove home with one leg,” he recalled. It took him six months to return to work.
| Photo Credit:
Reuters

Three demining experts told Reuters that operating in forests is far more difficult than clearing open fields as most demining machines cannot navigate around trees.

“It requires inch-by-inch manual clearance,” said Adam Komorowski, a regional director at the Mines Action Group NGO.

Decades and billions of dollars

The specialists interviewed said the process of repairing the damage to the forests would take decades and cost billions of dollars. Some doubted whether some heavily mined areas of forest would ever be cleared, citing past examples of forests declared no-go zones after previous European wars.

The country will need “many, many years” after the war to merely gauge the damage to its forests, said Strilets, who has since been replaced as environment minister.

The current official estimate is that demining all contaminated territory, including forests and other areas such as agricultural land, would take 70 years, he told Reuters in Kyiv on July 22.

Four ecologists with expertise in Ukrainian forests said the subsequent process of regenerating damaged areas would be complex and could take decades, plus would require billions of dollars of investment.

According to a June 2024 study on the Ukraine war’s carbon emissions, conflict-related forest fires directly emitted greenhouse gases equivalent to 6.75 million tonnes of CO2, the equivalent of the annual emissions of Armenia. Ukraine has also lost the carbon capture potential of those burnt trees.

The World Bank estimated in February that the damage wrought by the war on forests and other protected natural areas including marshes and wetlands exceeded $30 billion.

That included $3.3 billion of direct damage from fighting, $26.5 billion worth of wider economic and environmental costs including pollution, and a repair bill of $2.6 billion.

Ukraine’s position is that Russia should pay for the damage it has caused. Maksym Popov, an adviser on environmental issues to Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, told Reuters Kyiv was pursuing about 40 criminal cases against Russia over the devastation to forests.

An explosion is seen in the sky over the city during a Russian drone and missile strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine September 30, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The Ukrainian air force said on Friday (October 4, 2024) that Russia attacked critical infrastructure in the country with 19 drones overnight.

Air defences shot down nine drones, with seven more likely impacted by electronic jamming, it said in a statement, without saying what happened to the other three.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said an apartment building was damaged in the capital but reported no casualties. “The fire was promptly extinguished there,” he added.

“The attack also damaged a business administrative building in the central region of Kirovohrad, causing light injuries to one of the employees,” Governor Andriy Raykovych said.

Russian forces also hit critical infrastructure, utility facilities and 35 private residences in the past day in the southern Kherson region, according to Governor Oleksandr Prokudin. “Various attacks there killed one and injured four more,” he said.

Commander in Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi during a meeting.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Ukraine on Monday walked back an announcement that French military instructors would soon arrive in the country, saying that it was still in talks with Paris and other allies on the issue.

Kyiv’s Defence Ministry made the “clarification” after army chief Oleksandr Syrsky said that the first French military instructors would soon arrive in the war-battered country.

“As of now, we are still in discussions with France and other countries on this,” Ukraine’s Defence Ministry said in a statement.

It added that it had “begun internal work on the relevant documents on this issue in order not to waste time on coordinating bureaucratic issues when the relevant decision is made.”

Mr. Syrsky earlier said that he had “signed the documents that will allow the first French instructors to visit our training centres soon and get acquainted with their infrastructure and personnel.”

He made the announcement after he and Defence Minister Rustem Umerov took part in a video call with French Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu.

France’s Defence Ministry said the issue was being studied but did not confirm the deployment.

“Training on Ukrainian soil is one of the projects discussed since the conference on support for Ukraine convened by (French President Emmanuel Macron) on February 26,” it said.

“Like all projects discussed on this occasion, this continues to be the subject of work with the Ukrainians, in particular to understand their exact needs,” it added.

France does not officially have military personnel assisting or training Ukrainian forces in Ukraine.

Macron has repeatedly made comments on possible Western troop deployment to Ukraine, which has been met with fury in Moscow and with unease by France’s Western allies.

Kyiv, Ukraine:

Ukraine authorities on Tuesday suspended consular services for men of fighting age living abroad, after announcing measures to bring them home amid manpower shortages in the army fighting Russia.

Ukraine’s army has been struggling to hold frontlines, partly due to a lack of soldiers over two years into Russia’s invasion.  

Ukraine’s foreign affairs ministry “announced a temporary suspension of accepting new applications for consular services” for men between 18 and 60. 

It made an exception for documents allowing Ukrainians to return to Ukraine. 

The move would likely oblige Ukrainian men to return from abroad to undergo  administrative procedures that were previously available abroad.

The government has already adopted a mobilisation law, due to come into force on May 18, that toughens penalties against draft dodgers and obliges men to keep their military registration up-to-date. 

The ministry said men would be able to access consular services once the law came into force and “after updating their military registration.”

“Male citizen of Ukraine aged 18 to 60 with valid military registration documents will have full access to consular services,” the ministry said. 

Ukrainian men have been forbidden to leave the country since the invasion began, apart from a few exceptions. 

But some lived away before the war began, and Ukrainian media estimates that thousands more illegally fled the country.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Kharkiv:

The 240-meter television tower in Ukraine’s city of Kharkiv broke in half and fell to the ground on Monday, footage obtained by Reuters showed, after what local officials said was likely a Russian missile attack on television infrastructure.

The broadcasting signal was disrupted to Ukraine’s second-largest city, which has been pounded by Russian missile and drone strikes in recent weeks.

“At the moment there are interruptions to the digital television signal,” regional governor Oleh Syniehubov said.

There were no casualties because workers were in shelters, he added.

Footage from the scene showed the main mast of the tower breaking off and falling as a cloud of smoke rose into the sky.

It was not clear from the footage what had hit the mast, but Kharkiv prosecutors said Russia had likely used a cruise Kh-59 missile in the attack.

The video was verified by corroborating video from another angle showing the same moment the top of the tower collapsed.

Russia first attacked Kharkiv’s television tower several times in early March 2022 soon after it launched its full-scale invasion. The signal was disrupted at the time.

Moscow has recently stepped up its attacks, while Ukraine is suffering a shortage of air defense capabilities. Kharkiv and the surrounding region have experienced the most intense strikes.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

File picture of a Russian drone in Ukraine airspace
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Ukraine destroyed 29 of 31 drones launched by Russia and one cruise missile, its air force said on Tuesday, most of them targeting the regions of Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk.

The waves of overnight attacks lasted more than three hours, the southern command of Ukraine’s forces had said earlier.

Falling debris in the southeastern city of Dnipro caused a fire at a private firm that was quickly doused, said Serhiy Lysak, governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region.

Damage to manufacturing facilities at an industrial enterprise in the city of Pavlohrad led to a fire that was also put out, he added on the Telegram messaging app.

Sixteen drones were destroyed over the southern region of Mykolaiv, its governor, Vitaliy Kim, said.