Poisonous Web: How Drones and Missiles Are Turning Ukraine into a “Red Zone”

The war in Ukraine has long ceased to be just a frontline chronicle, where kilometers of the line of contact, the number of strikes, and types of weapons are counted. Parallel to this, another process is underway, less spectacular on screen but with far more lasting consequences: vast territories are gradually turning into spaces of accumulated poisoning, where air, soil, water, forests, and even the food chain are changing not for years, but possibly for entire generations. This is the conclusion drawn by the material featuring ecologist Aleksey Vasylyuk (Ukr.) on how explosions, fires, chemical emissions, and drone fiber optics are changing the Ukrainian environment.

For the Israeli reader, this is not an alien, distant topic.

Israel understands all too well that modern warfare strikes not only military targets. It breaks the infrastructure of life: water, agriculture, residential areas, ecosystems, human health. The Ukrainian experience today shows not only the cost of Russian aggression but also how in the 21st century, war can act as a tool of long-term environmental pressure.

Not only missiles: how war poisons soil, air, and water

Every explosion is not just a strike, but also a chemical trace

One of the main ideas of the text is expressed harshly and without embellishments: the most extensive damage to nature is caused by the explosions of munitions themselves.

And in two dimensions at once.

First comes physical destruction — shrapnel, blast wave, thermal impact, instant annihilation of all living things in the affected area. Then a chemical trace remains: the contents of the shell, missile, or drone inevitably enter the environment, regardless of whether the munition hit the target or not. Some of it goes into the air, some into the soil, and then seeps into groundwater with precipitation.

The problem is that the exact scale of such pollution is almost impossible to assess today. Not because no one wants to count, but because the war continues, munitions vary in composition, detonation location, and type of impact, and individual soil samples under such conditions yield scattered and often inconclusive results. In other words, pollution is already occurring, but its full map will appear much later.

Fires burn forests, but that’s only part of the problem

The second major factor is large-scale fires.

The material provides an example of the Serebryansky forestry and a long scorched strip stretching through the eastern regions of Ukraine. Trees, shrubs, birds, animals, insects — literally all living tissue of the area is destroyed there. But there is an important nuance here that makes the text stronger and more honest: the ecologist does not reduce everything to an apocalyptic picture. He directly states that where hostilities recede, nature partially begins to recover. Birds return, animals come, the wind brings seeds, new trees appear.

This is an important amendment for the Israeli audience and for any serious conversation about war in general. Not all damage is the same. There are losses that nature can heal over time. And there are those that remain almost forever.

Russia strikes not only at the front but at the land’s suitability for life

Strikes on chemical facilities and the logic of a ‘dead territory’

According to Aleksey Vasylyuk, besides explosions and fires, there is another particularly dangerous factor: deliberate strikes on technologically hazardous sites. These are chemical plants, oil depots, fertilizer warehouses, industrial sites. The text provides an example of Severodonetsk, where 36 chemical industry enterprises were destroyed. Everything stored there — raw materials, waste, technological materials, the contents of treatment facilities — could have entered the atmosphere, rivers, and groundwater.

And here the conversation goes beyond the usual ‘collateral damage.’ The meaning of such strikes, if following the logic of the text, is not only in the destruction of infrastructure as such. It is about systematically worsening living conditions in Ukraine. In fact, it is an attempt to turn part of the country into a space where living, building, growing, and returning will become increasingly difficult.

For Israel, which constantly analyzes not only military but also infrastructure threats, this aspect is especially understandable.

Land scorched not by metaphor, but by acid

One of the most severe parts of the original material concerns sulfur.

The ecologist explains that many munitions contain compounds that, after an explosion, enter the soil and then, when interacting with water, turn into sulfuric acid. Hence the formula, which sounds almost like journalism but in the context of the text is presented as a literal description of what is happening: the land is scorched by acid. Microorganisms that form and support the soil simply die.

Then it gets even worse. Even after the war ends, such pollution cannot be quickly and fully removed. The material mentions phytoremediation, that is, attempts to clean the environment using specially selected plants, but it is described only as a partial, limited solution. Essentially, it is pollution that for the current generation may turn out to be lifelong. And this is no longer a story about restoring facades and bridges. This is a story about land that may cease to be land in the normal, economic sense of the word.

At this point, a broader meaning for regional conversation arises.

NANews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency has repeatedly pointed out that modern wars need to be measured not only by the number of casualties and destroyed buildings. Ukraine now shows another terrifying facet: if the enemy targets the ecological foundation of life, the consequences stretch much longer than any military season.

After the war, ‘red zones’ may appear

Vasylyuk gives the example of France, where after World War I there were territories closed for life and use for decades. The meaning of the comparison is perfectly clear: in Ukraine, there may also be areas where people simply cannot return. Not because there is nothing to rebuild, but because the territory itself will be too polluted and dangerous.

And this is perhaps one of the heaviest conclusions of the text. People are waiting to return home, but the reality may be such that some homes will remain only on the map of memory.

Fiber optic ‘web’ and poisoned water: the new ecology of war

The Seim River and the threat that almost reached Kyiv

A separate section of the text is devoted to the largest river pollution. It concerns the story of 2024, when there was a threat that dangerous water from the Seim could reach the Dnipro and Kyiv through the Desna. In the capital, there was even talk about drinking water supplies. According to the ecologist, the pollution ultimately did not reach Kyiv, but he assesses the incident as unprecedented in scale. Everything living in the river was dying en masse. The final cause was never established, but the text provides a version of possible chemical contamination related to leather processing from the Russian side.

For the Israeli reader, the simple conclusion here is important: water in modern warfare becomes no less vulnerable than energy. And if poisoning moves through the river system for hundreds of kilometers, it is no longer a question of local damage, but of regional security.

Drones leave behind not only a strike but also a ‘plastic front’

Another new topic is fiber optics from drones. The text states that such ‘threads’ already cover dozens of kilometers of the front and frontline zones, getting tangled in branches, bushes, trees. The most obvious effect so far is the death of birds and small animals. They get entangled in the fibers, cannot escape, and die. There are already observations of birds using this material for nests, but this is rather a rare detail against the backdrop of the overall picture of mass harm.

Currently, this problem is still largely under-researched.

But if the war drags on, the fiber will begin to break down, and then a new threat will arise: microplastics and tiny fragments of inorganic fibers will enter the environment, soil, living organisms, and then the food chain. The text directly draws an analogy with fiberglass, only scattered across the field and practically impossible to collect. This is no longer a fantasy about a distant future, but a very real scenario of accumulated pollution.

That is why the main conclusion here sounds sober and grim.

The longer the war goes on, the deeper the changes become, which cannot simply be undone by a single victory date. Liberating the territory is one thing. Returning it to normal, safe life is quite another. And this means that the ecological bill of this war will come to Ukraine even after the fighting ends, when the cameras leave, and people will have to deal not with the chronicle of strikes, but with their legacy.