Ukraine’s biosphere is being degraded constantly by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s noosphere.
The concepts of “biosphere” and “noosphere” were developed in the 1920s and 1930s by the Russian Ukrainian geochemist Volodymyr Vernadsky (1863-1945) as he interacted with the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin and the Sorbonne philosopher and mathematician Édouard Le Roy.
While the two Frenchmen tried to unify science and faith, Vernadsky sought materialist explanations for the biosphere, the life he saw pulsing through and above the earth’s crust, and the human reason and creativity, or noosphere, which shapes and is shaped by it.
The noosphere (from Greek noos, mind) encompasses all human consciousness, knowledge, and technology emerging from and interacting with the biosphere. It represents humanity becoming a geological force, a superorganism where intelligence, ideas, culture, and information create a new dimension of planetary evolution. And the outcomes can be positive or negative.
Vernadsky’s father, Ivan, was born in Kyiv in 1821 and died in St Petersburg in 1884. Like his son, he studied and worked in Russia and Ukraine, serving as director of the Kharkiv branch of the State Bank from 1868 to 1876. Volodymyr spent much of his youth in Kharkiv and, aged 15, he wrote in his diary that “Ukrainians are terribly oppressed… it is completely forbidden to print books in my native language.”
Having studied, taught, and researched at Russian universities, after the Bolshevik Revolution Vernadsky in 1918 founded the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and the National Library.
De Chardin and Vernadsky hoped that human thinking and actions would not harm the biosphere but bolster its vitality. Putin’s war on Ukraine, however, has completely contradicted any hope that the Kremlin’s noosphere could enhance the shared biosphere.
The environmental damage from the war in Ukraine is immense. Military vehicles and explosions impact air quality and increase the release of persistent organic pollutants, such as polychlorinated biphenyls, into the atmosphere. Explosive munitions, from hand grenades to heavy artillery, produce “bombturbation” — craters and soil disruption that affect air, water, and soil.
All this has led to massive carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, and contamination from toxins, with recovery potentially taking decades and causing long-term health risks. Key impacts include widespread land pollution, destruction of unique ecosystems, and disruption of vital environmental processes, such as carbon absorption. A third of Ukraine’s rich, black, fertile soil, known as chernozem, and millions of hectares of forest may be unusable after the war.
Moscow’s destruction of the Kakhovka dam, Ukraine’s largest, in June 2023, provides a salutary case study of long-term environmental and health impacts. Its bombing amounted to ecocide, and sparked probably the worst environmental disaster in Europe since Chernobyl in 1986.
The result was catastrophic flooding that submerged thousands of hectares of land, claimed dozens of human lives, and displaced thousands. It also prevented normal access to drinking water and irrigation systems, and many farm animals, pets, and wildlife drowned.
Protected natural habitats perished, and some 150 tons of toxic industrial lubricants were released alongside contaminants from sewage pits, petrol stations, and agrochemical and pesticide stores, not to mention dislodged landmines. These contaminants drifted down the Dnipro River into the Black Sea, washing the shores of six countries, including Romania, Bulgaria, and Russia itself.
Kakhovka’s destruction also endangered the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, as the dam was the primary source for its supply of cooling water.
Danger at Chernobyl never went away. Following the 1986 explosion, Soviet authorities constructed a sarcophagus over the nuclear reactor. But the sarcophagus had only a 30-year lifespan, creating the need for a protective shell to prevent radioactive material from leaking out for at least 100 years.
Early in 2025, a Russian drone damaged the shield’s roof, causing it to lose its primary containment function. Temporary repairs have been made, but full restoration requires international support.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says repairs are essential to stop “further degradation” of the nuclear shelter and ensure long-term nuclear safety. The IAEA also inspected electrical substations linked to nuclear safety and declared them “indispensable for providing the electricity all nuclear power plants need for reactor cooling and other safety systems.”
It didn’t stop Russia from increasing the number and destructiveness of its strikes against both civilian and military targets.
It is difficult to put a monetary value on the damage to Ukraine’s biosphere, in part because no one knows how long the fighting will continue or how different kinds of damage will interact.
If bird populations shrink, for example, how will that affect the harvests on which many developing nations depend? How long will it take to clean polluted air, soil, and water? The total bill for environmental damage alone could easily run to a trillion dollars, nearly half of Russia’s GDP, and would have to be added to the two trillion dollars needed to help compensate for the loss of human life, as well as buildings and infrastructure.
Like Iraq, when it was billed $52.4 billion for the damage it inflicted on Kuwait, Russia’s oil revenues could finance reparations. Still, peace plans for Ukraine being discussed in late 2025 would reward the aggressor and rob the victim, as they omit any obligation or punishment for war crimes.
Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Boston University. He wrote Blood Debts: What Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims (Washington, DC: Westphalia Press, 2023).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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