Military Ecology and Russia’s War Machine

Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues that armed conflicts today are increasingly akin to terrorism rather than conventional warfare. He uses the term “atmoterrorism” to describe a shift in military strategy away from directly damaging the enemy’s military personnel and weaponry and toward targeting the environmental conditions that make survival possible (1). This shift first became visible during World War I with the introduction of chemical weapons. The logic of atmospheric war reached its most extreme and globally consequential form during the Cold War, when the development of nuclear weapons made total annihilation a tangible possibility. Over the twentieth century, the catastrophic effects of atomic explosions, chemical and biological agents, and the military’s heavy carbon footprint became impossible to ignore.

The scientific study of the relationships between living organisms and their environments, known as ecology, gained significant cultural traction during the environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In public discourse, the concept of ecology evolved to encompass the preservation of the natural world from destructive human practices, including those stemming from military activities. Throughout Europe, environmental groups have historically engaged in antimilitary campaigns, opposing the testing and deployment of nuclear weapons, as well as the expansion of the military-industrial complex. Examples of such mobilization include protests against French nuclear testing in the Pacific, the Larzac Movement, the Danish OOA’s collaboration with peace organizations, and the Dutch IKV’s mobilizations against the neutron bomb. By the early 1980s, this peace-ecology alliance had also taken root in the UK and West Germany, where emerging Green networks linked ecological concerns with opposition to NATO’s nuclear infrastructure. 

Against this backdrop, the term “military ecology” can sound like an oxymoron. Historically, it emerged in response to the rapid expansion of environmental destruction that accompanied the growing scale and technological complexity of modern warfare. States began establishing military ecology units within their armed forces. Military ecologists were formally tasked with assessing the environmental impact of military operations, mitigating potential damage, and remediating harm already done [author’s note: the term “environmental security” is more widely used in the academic sphere and is defined as the relationship between security concerns, such as armed conflict, and the natural environment; here, we use “military ecology” to refer more narrowly to the specific institutions, practices, and knowledge production within the armed forces that are tasked with environmental security]. On paper, military ecologists appear to be the “good guys” within the armed forces. In practice, however, these commitments often clash with the realities of military strategy and occupation.

This raises the question: Do attempts to make war “green” actually mitigate its devastating environmental impact? In the case of the Russian military, the short answer is no. What follows is an examination of how military ecology serves as an ideological and technical instrument of militarism and colonial power. We will trace its evolution from the Cold War to the present, considering its role within the contemporary Russian Armed Forces and in their full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Cold War Environments

The Cold War brought ecology, science, and militarism together in a tight knot, enmeshing the natural world in the logic of total war and national security. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, the environment became a battleground for ideology and technoscientific intervention. In the United States, the postwar expansion of the military-industrial research complex laid the institutional foundations for modern environmental science. Oceanography, meteorology, and ecology flourished under military patronage, as the armed services commissioned studies of climate, radiation, and planetary systems to model the global battlefield of potential nuclear war (2). Projects designed to measure the Earth’s geophysical and biological vulnerabilities under conditions of total destruction became, paradoxically, the intellectual soil from which systems ecology and global environmental consciousness later emerged. It can even be argued that ecosystem ecology was “an artefact of the Manhattan Project,” a science of energy flows, feedback, and control derived from cybernetics and thermodynamics, aimed at modeling self-regulating systems in both nature and machines (3). The militarist worldview, obsessed with environmental manipulation and systemic vulnerability, erased distinctions between ecological knowledge and military research.

In the Soviet Union — the US’s Cold War Other — environmental destruction by the military-industrial complex was immense, extending across all ecosystems and sectors tied to defense, and prompting some historians to describe the resulting conditions as “ecocide” (4). Most specialists believe that 30 to 40 percent of the Soviet industrial effort was devoted to the military (5). If the Ministry of Defense needed environmentally devastating measures to achieve its goals, they were justified by “national strategic interests.” They were not subject to discussion even within the USSR’s Council of Ministers (6), the highest executive and administrative organ of state authority, which was technically superior to the Ministry of Defence. The role of the armed forces as polluters was almost as secret as most weapons development programs. 

At the same time, ecological discourse was often instrumentalized for ideological purposes. Soviet officials portrayed pollution as a symptom of Western decadence, even as their own industrial and military projects devastated ecosystems. By the Brezhnev era, environmental law and conservation policies — including the expansion of zapovedniki and the creation of environmental committees — were framed as evidence of socialist progress and global leadership. Yet these measures remained subordinated to the imperatives of production and military parity (5). The Cold War competition extended into environmental diplomacy: Soviet representatives linked ecological protection to disarmament in the UN forums, while propaganda weaponized the rhetoric of ecological catastrophe against the West, accusing the United States of conducting biological warfare and spreading epidemics. 

The Soviet system excelled at producing large numbers of engineers with specialized technical training. By 1991, the USSR boasted one-third of the world’s engineers and one-quarter of its physicists, yet environmental education had barely taken root (6). Only a few officers were even assigned to monitor the army’s treatment of nature. In response to a 1978 Party and Council of Ministers resolution on strengthening environmental protection, the Minister of Defense issued Order No. 156 in 1980, creating an Environmental Protection Inspectorate. In 1987, this inspectorate was elevated to an independent subdivision under the Deputy Minister of Defense and Chief of Rear Services of the Armed Forces. However, even under pressure from the Minister of Defense, many units lacked external environmental inspectors, and the inspectorates created in 1987 have been hollowed out — staff numbers cut in half, with the remainder reassigned elsewhere (4). 

In 1988, Lieutenant Colonel Yury Sorokin, director of the Environmental Protection Inspectorate, cautiously revealed in an obscure military journal that the army’s conduct had been less than sensitive: “There are so many deficiencies in our [military] environmental pro­tection practices that we simply cannot remain silent about them.” Citing forest fires, uncontrolled garbage dump­ing, and petroleum wastes leaking into the water supplies of garrison towns, he added that the installation of emission-control devices on military cars, trucks, and armor was spreading slowly. Even though inspectors traveled widely to prod commanders to clean up their bases and educate their troops, it was “too early” to speak of improvements (4). As Sorokin suggested, the underlying problem was the persistent belief that environmental protection was secondary and that violations carry few consequences.

Throughout the late Soviet period, the military remained a major but largely opaque source of environmental devastation, from routine waste dumping to catastrophic nuclear accidents. Only fragments of information made their way into the public sphere. High-profile disasters were widely reported yet seldom acknowledged by the armed forces, deepening public distrust. Activists, journalists, and scientists such as Aleksei Yablokov exposed patterns of secrecy, rising cancer rates in affected regions, and the long-term fallout of sites like Baikonur and Lake Karachay. Despite occasional protests, lawsuits, and demands for cleanup (8), the defense establishment consistently deflected responsibility, keeping much of the ecological damage hidden from both oversight and accountability.

Ultimately, the Soviet military suffered from the environmental devastation it caused. Environmental degradation, for example, contributed directly to declining military strength. By 1990, fewer than half of Soviet draft-age men were fit for duty. Many young men in industrial regions plagued by toxic pollution — such as Chelyabinsk and Krasnodar — were declared unfit for military service due to poor health. Soldiers also fell ill because of poorly maintained barracks and inadequate hygiene in military garrisons (4). As a result, by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the military faced criticism not just because of the growing environmental awareness and activism that followed the policies of glasnost and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (8), but also because it failed to protect its own troops and future military personnel. That is why one of the main aims of military ecology — and of the institutions created to enforce — was therefore to protect military personnel from environmental harm caused by the armed forces themselves. 

Military Ecology in Russia 

After the collapse of the USSR, military ecology was rebuilt alongside the new Russian Armed Forces. In 1992, the former Environmental Protection Inspectorate was transformed into the Directorate for Ecology and Special Means of Protection within the Russian Ministry of Defense, initially headed by Colonel Sergey Grigorov — whose career spanned Afghanistan, the Chernobyl cleanup, and international Antarctic work. From 1997 onward, he led the Directorate for Environmental Safety, overseeing the destruction of chemical weapons stockpiles. His later appointments in the State Technical Commission under the President and the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control, and eventually his role as a presidential adviser, reflect a broader shift in Russia’s militarized priorities: from ecological and chemical security toward information protection and cyber defense.

Ecological oversight of the military has never been independent. Periods of expansion or decline had little to do with environmental needs and more to do with shifting political will and administrative restructuring, shaped by geopolitical ambition, economic surplus, and institutional security. The brief period in the late 1990s when the Environmental Service reported directly to the Minister of Defense suggested a measure of institutional autonomy. However, it was soon folded into the logistics hierarchy and stripped of influence. The dissolution of the State Committee on Environmental Protection in 2000 weakened civilian oversight, and internal reforms from 2008 to 2014 eliminated roughly 80% of the military’s ecological staff. A 2020 presidential decree once again consolidated environmental responsibilities within the Ministry of Defense, but without altering the underlying hierarchy. 

Routine responsibilities today include drafting regulatory documents, conducting environmental assessments of military installations, and monitoring emissions from garrison boiler houses, which can account for as much as 70–80% of local air pollution. Military academies even use dedicated textbooks, such as Military Ecology, to train personnel. Official documents state that environmental requirements are to be observed only insofar as they do not interfere with the primary task: inflicting maximum losses on the enemy. This formulation turns ecological safety into a well-meaning recommendation rather than a binding norm. In practice, it is enforced only when it does not impede combat objectives, when political attention is directed toward it, or when accumulated damage begins to hinder the army’s own operations.

As a result, military ecology works almost entirely in a reactive mode. Instead of systematic prevention, it deals with the long-term consequences of military activity: decades-old petroleum contamination, derelict airfields and testing ranges, spent nuclear fuel storage sites, polluted naval waters, and mountains of scrap metal on Arctic islands. As Vladimir Trishunkin,  the chief of the Material and Technical Support Command, and Olga Astafeeva, the chief of the Environmental Security Service, noted, standards for permissible environmental impact in military units began to be developed only in 2018. As of 2020, Astafeeva pointed to chronic underfunding for the construction, repair, and modernization of environmental protection facilities in the armed forces, which prevented the full implementation of measures to reduce environmental harm.

The “Ecology” national project (2011–2024) allowed military units with environmental responsibilities to receive resources for dismantling chemical and nuclear facilities and building waste-management infrastructure. Yet the newly allocated funding primarily supported cleanup and demolition rather than proactive environmental management. Some proposals even envisioned converting former chemical weapons destruction plants into waste-incineration sites, indicating the extent to which ecological work remains tied to military-industrial repurposing.

In practice, environmental security within the Russian Armed Forces continues to oscillate depending on political priorities and remains firmly secondary to tactical considerations. What exists is not a coherent system of ecological protection but a belated attempt to manage problems that have long spiralled out of control. This trajectory suggests that ecological oversight of the military cannot be effectively exercised from within the military itself. By keeping ecological monitoring behind the veil of military secrecy, the state effectively ensures that accountability remains an internal administrative exercise rather than a true safeguard for public health or environmental integrity.

Environmental War

In addition to the conventional pollution and environmental degradation resulting from military tests of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, the military’s impact during armed conflicts is profound and multifaceted. Echoing the Cold War–era ideological appeals to environmental protection as a moral justification for militarized action, the Russian Federation continues to deploy ecological and environmental arguments to legitimize military aggression. For instance, in an interview, Alevtin Yunak, who served as head of Environmental Security from 2002 to 2008, asserted that Russian military operations in Chechnya were aimed at averting substantial ecological damage: 

“Over the past ten years, ‘environmental terrorism’ has gripped Russia’s North Caucasus region, particularly Chechnya and Ingushetia. It is well known that military ecologists were among the first to sound the alarm and begin combating it. <...> Thousands of makeshift mini-oil refineries, built in violation of existing technical standards, were operated without any oversight or control. This resulted in extensive pockets of oil pollution. The Ministry of Defense took consistent measures to normalize the environmental situation in Chechnya.” 

Contrary to the claims of a Russian general, the ecological situation in Chechnya deteriorated due to the destruction of industrial infrastructure by Russian airstrikes, the deliberate contamination of soil and rivers with nuclear waste from the Radon burial site, the devastation of irrigation systems and pesticide storage facilities, and the bombing of forests and valuable alpine pastures. These events led to a sharp rise in overall morbidity and reduced life expectancy, as well as surges in cancer and tuberculosis among the Chechen population.

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During the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has caused — and continues to cause — enormous environmental damage, which has been documented by Ukrainian and international researchers and environmentalists (9). Some Ukrainian researchers, such as Svitlana Matviyenko, argue that pollution is a deliberate weapon of war and part of what she calls “elemental warfare.” Russian media often portrays ecological disasters as uncontrollable events, as the result of natural forces rather than political decisions or military strategy. This framing obscures accountability and limits public scrutiny. While the role of environmental units in internal decision-making remains classified, their actions can be traced in connection with two of the war’s most consequential ecological crises: the seizure of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Station.

Official reports document the involvement of the Troops of Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense (NBC Protection troops) in operations involving incendiary and phosphorus munitions in Ukraine, despite their responsibility for the environmental impacts of military activity. Russian officials explicitly cited the involvement of the “Ecological-Chemical-Biological Protection Troops” during the assault on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP). These troops are equipped with heavy flamethrower systems, including the TOS-1A Solntsepyok and the TOS-2 Tosochka. These systems have an extended range and wide-area impact, making them effective battlefield weapons but also significant environmental hazards. During the conflict, four brigades and four regiments were awarded the honorary “Guards” title, four officers received the “Hero of Russia” title, and 4,563 service members received state or departmental distinctions, including 320 Orders of Courage. This suggests that these “protection” units have focused on offensive tasks, including attacks involving chemical agents and thermobaric systems.

Structurally, this reflects a deeper contradiction: environmental protection within the military is partly overseen by the same divisions responsible for deploying biological and chemical weapons. While the NBC Protection troops are formally tasked with shielding the armed forces from weapons of mass destruction and mitigating their consequences, in practice they have become both mitigators and producers.

Mentions of “ecological troops” also circulate widely in the propaganda ecosystem surrounding the war. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, state media have amplified statements from the head of the NBC Protection troops, General Igor Kirillov, delivered at Ministry of Defense briefings. Kirillov claimed that U.S. biolaboratories in Ukraine were studying mosquito-borne viruses, accused Ukraine of spreading avian influenza in Russia, and later alleged that COVID-19 originated in the United States and was artificially created. In October 2024, he accused Ukraine of using Western chemical weapons in Sudzha. The day before he died, Ukraine’s Security Service charged him with using banned chemical agents on a large scale. 

In official rhetoric, ecological disasters are routinely attributed to Ukrainian sabotage. In 2023, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova blamed Kyiv for the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Plant and the resulting humanitarian and environmental damage — flooded communities, contaminated waterways, and mass animal deaths. The same narrative frames Ukraine as negligent or malicious in its management of hazardous sites, such as the Pridneprovsky Chemical Plant, where large volumes of radioactive waste are said to threaten the Dnieper basin. In both cases, ecological risk is externalized onto Ukraine, while the presence, responsibilities, and actions of Russia’s own environmental protection structures are conspicuously absent from the account. These narratives reveal how ecological and biological rhetoric is instrumentalized within information warfare, blurring the line between environmental protection and the legitimation of military aggression.

Military ecology reveals how environmental protection is absorbed into the logic of war. It is mobilized when useful, ignored when inconvenient, and weaponized when strategically effective. In the case of Russia, ecological rhetoric becomes a means of legitimizing violence, and ecological units oscillate between mitigating past harm and enabling new forms of destruction. Instead of preventing catastrophe, military ecology turns the environmental crisis into a resource for militarized power and colonization.

References:

1. Sloterdijk, P. (2009). Terror From The Air. MIT Press / Semiotext(e).
   
   
2. Hamblin, J. D. (2013). Arming Mother Nature: The birth of catastrophic environmentalism. Oxford University Press.
   
   
3. Walker, J. (2020). More Heat Than Life: The Tangled Roots Of Ecology, Energy, And Economics. Palgrave Macmillan.
   
   
4. Feshbach, M., & Friendly, A., Jr. (1992). Ecocide in the USSR. Basic Books.
   
   
5. Josephson, P., Dronin, N., Mnatsakanian, R., Cherp, A., Efremenko, D., & Larin, V. (2013). An Environmental History Of Russia. Cambridge University Press.
   
   
6. Komarov, B. (1980). The Destruction Of Nature In The Soviet Union. Pluto Press.
   
   
7. McNeill, J. R., & Unger, C. R. (Eds.). (2010). Environmental Histories Of The Cold War. Cambridge University Press, 23.
   
   
8. Coumel, L., & Elie, M. (2013). A belated and tragic ecological revolution: Nature, disasters, and green activists in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet states, 1960s–2010s. The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 40(2), 157–165.
   
   
9.  Tsymbalyuk, D. (2025). Ecocide in Ukraine: The environmental cost of Russia's war. Polity.

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