War, unsurprisingly, has made conservation a lot more difficult. Oleg Dyakov, a rewilding officer from Rewilding Ukraine’s headquarters in Odesa and one of the organization’s co-founders, recounts the dangers his team has faced with a common disappointment. Mines drifting from the Black Sea have hindered the release of fallow deer, and the Dalmatian Pelicans’ surveillance activities are limited to binoculars and telescopes because areas of the Plains are restricted by the Ukrainian government. (In peacetime, they can count more accurately with the help of drones.)
The Askania Nova reserve—Ukraine’s oldest and largest biosphere, located on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River—has been under Russian occupation since last spring. Staff at the park continued their conservation work for nearly a year. “The people who do their job there, they are heroes,” Dyakov said. “No doubt.” But in March 2023, a final announcement on the reserve’s website said that a new Russian board of directors had been created.
The nature reserve is home to an extensive collection of domesticated and wild ungulates, including kulans. Before the war, Rewilding Ukraine relied on nature reserves to provide herds for the Tarutino Steppe; two successful iterations of the original reread donkeys came from Askania Nova.
“Now there is only one chance, and that is to bring animals from Western Europe,” explains Dyakov. But this, he notes, is both costly and bureaucraticly cumbersome—“especially under wartime conditions.” The birth of the rebuilt kulans on the Tarutino Steppe is now important, says Dyakov, not only because it shows the success of their project, but also because it may be the only way the herd can thrive.
Funds to keep projects running have sometimes run out and rangers have had to pay out of pocket to keep them running. “We cannot wait. The animals can’t wait,” Muntianu said.
In Ukraine’s fight for survival and identity, said Dyakov, conservation has certainly taken on a patriotic aspect. The Russian invasion tore apart millions of hectares of land that he and so many others had spent decades defending. Some in the broader conservation and rewildage movements have attempted to demonstrate that the restoration of the landscape can be seen as an element of its protection.
Bohdan Prots, ecologist and Executive Director of the Danube-Carpathian Program, an Lviv-based NGO dedicated to conservation and lobbying activities in support of stronger environmental legislation, said: “A tank cannot go through wetlands. On Ukraine’s northwestern border, flooded fields and swamps have prevented the Russian military from launching attacks through Belarus, Prots said. He believes that “Rebuilding is a tool to protect the country.”
Ukraine’s land and ecosystems have been used as weapons in the conflict. In February 2022, Ukrainian forces flooded the Kyiv-Irpin swamps by breaking a Soviet-era dam, making it harder for Russian troops to maneuver—a move that is at least partially credited with repelling the invaders and saving the capital from capture. In June, Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine destroyed—most likely Russia—causing devastation over a large areaand lead to calls to add environmental war crimes to a growing list of Kremlin crimes.
