From Chornobyl to the Russo-Ukrainian War: Ukraine and the Ecopolitics of War, Energy, and Climate Change

Forty years ago, the Chornobyl nuclear accident placed the lives of Ukrainians and others at grave risk from industrial contamination. Today’s war waged by Russia places Ukrainians in a similar situation as victims of an energy superpower’s quest to “reimperialize.” This talk will argue that both events are not only connected through a long and partly colonial relationship between Russia and Ukraine, but that they place Ukraine into a much longer ecopolitical history that reduces land and its traditional inhabitants to the energy resources to be extracted from it. Today’s climate crisis is the logical end-point of that history, and its impacts—disastrous weather events, migration pressures, and current and foreseeable wars over remaining oil reserves, precious metals, shipping channels, and the opening Arctic—place us all in precarious relationships with the ground we inhabit. The Russo-Ukrainian war, I argue, is an environmental war that is a harbinger of wars to come—which makes Ukrainians’ surprising resistance a source of insight for the rest of us. What is it that makes land worth defending? What makes ecocide (as in the destruction of land and water systems) also a cultural fact, and therefore also genocidal? How is this relevant in an age of multipolar neo-imperialisms?

 

 

Adrian Ivakhiv holds the J.S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. Until 2024, he was a professor of environmental thought and culture, and Steven Rubenstein Professor of Environment and Natural Resources, at the University of Vermont, USA, where he founded EcoCultureLab. He is author or editor of several books including “The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds” (2025), “Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times” (2018), and the anthology “Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth” (2025, open access). Born in Toronto to Ukrainian refugee parents, he was a Canada-USSR Scholar in 1989–90 in Kyïv and Lviv and has conducted research in Ukraine intermittently since then. He has published on the cultural politics of Chornobyl, Ukrainian-Polish borderland identities, Ukrainian environmental ethics, the Ukrainian Native Faith movement, and the environmental politics of the Russo-Ukrainian war. He has been a Fulbright scholar (Germany-Ukraine) and a Fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and the Cinepoetics Centre in Advanced Film Studies. He also co-edits Media+Environment journal, hosts the “Terrestrialism” substack, and plays and composes music. His most recent albums “Music for Air Raids” and “Unsettled Skies” propose Ukrainian wartime responses to Brian Eno’s “Ambient: Music for Airports.” Since 2014, he has hosted the blog “UKR-TAZ: A Ukrainian Temporary Autonomous Zone” (blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv-ukrtaz).