This article is an edited excerpt from Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War, published in March 2025 by Polity Press.
At the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, my mum WhatsApped me with photos from our family archive, just in case our building was hit and the photos would be lost. Among the photos of me as a child there was one taken during a holiday celebration in kindergarten, where I was pictured with a wheat crown.
I struggle to remember the occasion, and so do my parents. After all, I grew up in one of the grain-making regions, Mykolaiv Oblast, where even the biggest market in the city is called Kolos. I am surprised that I never use and in fact do not know the English equivalent of the word kolos, and that it is translated with a rather unspecific word, ‘ear’, meaning a top part of a grain.
My wheat crown was meant to allude to the sacredness of bread, which is deeply ingrained in the everyday life and traditional cultures of Ukraine. In the old days, the calendar was structured around harvesting work, as well as the various rituals and symbols related to harvesting, which were performed throughout the year. The beginning and the end of the harvesting season were celebrated, and, according to Iuri Krut’, the first collected sheaf was carried home and placed visibly for everyone to admire.
Today, the harvesting songs that were sung by peasants in the fields occupy a prominent place in the country’s music heritage. Bread has also accompanied the deceased through their burial and after their death; Serhii Tsypyshev, for example, documents practices of leaving bread on graves on remembrance days in the Polissia region. These beliefs are echoed in contemporary commemorative practices; in 2020 in Kropyvnytskyi, for example, a Memory Field was planted with wheat to honour the soldiers fallen in the war. In August of the same year, families and others close to the killed soldiers collected the harvest, making didukhs, traditional Christmas decorations made from a sheaf of wheat.
Above: a video essay produced by Tsymbalyuk in 2023, building on her conversations with her mother and the photos of Kyiv they shared over WhatsApp following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Among some of the most iconic images of the war are photos of bombed grain facilities, of piles of grain burnt black, or of agricultural fields in flames. By burning grain Russia not only attacks global food security and Ukraine’s agricultural enterprises, it also attacks the revered place of bread in Ukraine’s culture, conditioned not only by the old beliefs but also by previous experiences of being killed through starvation.
For people in Ukraine, images of destroyed grain and images of death are interlocked in a close relationship of cultural and collective memory. This relationship is intimate because many of us have grown up with (silences in) stories and family memories, most acutely expressed by elders kissing the bread if (God forbid!) it falls on the floor, or always making sure all food is eaten and nothing is ever thrown away. My great-grandmother Darka used to tell how once, on the way to a fair, she slept by a stack of hay and woke up hearing strangers saying that they were going to eat her. I did not know what to make of that story when I was little. I did not know until I learned about Holodomor, the Soviet human-made famine of 1932–33, which affected millions of peasants in Ukraine who resisted Soviet collectivization.
For many Ukrainians, three or four generations back is all we can count of our family histories, violently shaped by repressions, persecutions, and wars. For many of us, some of the oldest family histories we know are survival stories of Holodomor, where bread acquired an existential dimension. In these stories a piece of bread can appear almost as a divine entity, as bright as the sun and light itself, as it does in a testimony by Anastasiia Hulei. She remembered when a mother of her friend took out of a chest a piece of bread and placed it on a white cloth on the windowsill, and how she felt hypnotised by the view: “We are standing there with our jaws dropped, we cannot breathe – we see bread. The sun is shining through the window, and it [the bread] glows like gold.” This cultural and collective memory makes bread into a charged borderline archive, where the attacks on grain reverberate with the generational pain of murder committed through the destruction of bread.
With the Russian full-scale invasion, among the many narratives about Ukraine appearing in the news globally, the old myth of a breadbasket resurfaced with a poignant new intensity. Prior to the war, Ukraine was one of the world’s largest exporters of grains and oilseeds, comprising 18% of world total exports of maize, 12% of wheat, and 50% of sunflower oil. The top three countries importing Ukrainian wheat were Egypt, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, with more than 90% being exported outside Europe. This allowed Ukraine to play a major role in global food security.
The value of Ukrainian grain for the world has been so high that the initiative that allowed its export, the Black Sea Grain Initiative of July 2022, was the only deal struck that involved both Ukraine and Russia since the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion. The initiative became possible through the mediation of Turkey and the UN, whereby both Russia and Ukraine signed agreements with Turkey and the UN in order to avoid doing a direct deal between themselves.
In July 2023 Russia decided not to extend the agreement and unilaterally withdrew from the grain deal. This decision was followed by intensified strategic targeting of Ukrainian grain storage facilities and ports exporting grain. According to Ukrainian news reports, on the night of 19 July 2023, Russia attacked Chornomorsk port in Odesa Oblast, destroying 60,000 tonnes of grain; on the night of 2 August, Russia destroyed almost 40,000 tonnes of grain in Odesa Oblast; on the night of 23 August, during which Izmail port in Odesa Oblast was attacked, 13,000 tonnes of grain were ruined. Ukraine estimated that, in the four months after leaving the agreement, 300,000 tonnes of grain were destroyed.
In addition to attacking storage facilities, Russia has been stealing grain and other agricultural produce from Ukrainian farmers in the occupied territories. A BBC investigation tracked the transport of stolen grain from the occupied parts of the Ukrainian mainland to Crimea, and from Crimea to Russia or further to Syria. There have also been accusations of the Russian military deliberately torching agricultural fields.
Following the Russian full-scale invasion, the EU liberalised all trade with Ukraine and established ‘Solidarity Lanes’. However, in April 2023, after complaints from local farmers that their businesses were jeopardised by the influx of cheaper imports from Ukraine, Poland and Hungary decided to unilaterally ban the import and transit of a long list of Ukrainian agricultural products. Rejecting these unilateral bans, in May the European Commission adopted temporary preventive measures on the import of wheat, maize, rapeseed, and sunflower seed from Ukraine. The import of these products was allowed for free circulation in all EU countries except Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. The temporary measures did not exclude transit through these countries. On 15 September, the EU’s restrictive measures expired, but Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia decided to maintain the ban.
On 6 November, Polish truck drivers started a blockade of three border crossings with Ukraine. They complained about unfair competition and border regulation. On 23 November, Polish farmers joined the truck drivers. The blockade was part of the larger farmers’ protests across the EU, in which agrarians in different countries expressed their concerns over proposed EU environmental regulations, as well as trade, including with Ukraine.
While the protesters and the Polish authorities claimed they were not obstructing the movement of humanitarian or military-related aid, many such trucks faced delays. At least four Ukrainian drivers died while waiting during the blockade. On 18 February 2024, Polish farmers blocked the Kyiv-Chełm train, which – in the absence of air transport operating in Ukraine – is one of the main ways of getting out of the country, and which people use for transit to further connecting trains and flights. Polish protesters also employed various provocative gestures, such as displaying the flag of the Soviet Union and a poster saying “Putin, bring order to Ukraine and Brussels, and our parliamentarians”, and imitating air raid sirens.
On 25 February, almost two years after the start of the Russian full-scale invasion, Polish farmers destroyed 160 tonnes of Ukrainian grain, spilling it from the train wagons near a Polish railway station. In an op-ed for Radio Free Europe, Oksana Pelenska argued that people in Ukraine were especially hurt by this act of destruction, because it reminded them of the violence of Holodomor. In March, Polish farmers protested in Warsaw against imports from Ukraine and the EU’s Green Deal. On 20 March, the farmers held a nationwide strike, blocking highways across Poland. In late April, the border blockade was finally lifted.
For centuries, the lands of contemporary Ukraine, with the fertility of their soil or chornozem, have been imagined as a breadbasket, as one of the world’s granaries. In the words of Asia Bazdyrieva, the imaginary of the breadbasket “envisions the infinitely fertile black soil and mineral richness of a land that could easily feed the whole world, an inexhaustible resource unconditionally given by nature”.
The myth of the breadbasket has been central to upholding the hierarchy of agricultural extractions and dependencies. Produced by predominantly unfree labour (whether in the form of serfdom or Soviet collective farms), grain grown on the lands that now constitute Ukraine was central to the operation of different political powers and their imperial and colonial projects, whether the Russian Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Soviet Union, or others. The extraction of grain and the labour that produced it allowed these diverse powers to sustain their dominance and at times to further expand, conquering and subjugating new territories and peoples.
As Bazdyrieva points out, the lasting legacy of the breadbasket myth also survives in its internalisation and nationalisation within Ukraine itself. My childhood wheat crown photo confirms this persisting colonial imaginary. Referring to Ukraine’s breadbasket role as “a raw material appendage in the current global food market”, environmentalist Olexiy Burkovskyi argues that this role comes at a high cost in environmental destruction, including loss of biodiversity and soil depletion, particularly in the steppe regions.
These regions are already extremely endangered, with, prior to the war, unploughed steppes covering only 3% of the country’s territory. The Russian invasion has not only predominantly taken place in the steppe regions of Ukraine, further endangering them, it has also put those steppes that remain outside the military zone at risk, as the immense destruction of agricultural soils results in the over-ploughing of other available lands.
The steppes have been devastated to produce grain which is then destroyed by the Russian attacks. Farmers in Ukraine have been working under unprecedented conditions, dealing with landmines and other unexploded ordnance with little or no help, and threatened by missile and drone attacks. This is not to mention the climate crisis, which is severely impacting agrarians globally. The southern ‘breadbasket’ regions of Ukraine are at an increased risk from climate change – in particular, droughts.
These are the conditions in which farmers have kept growing enough grain for export, grain which has been targeted and burnt. Kateryna Nekrecha and Anna Tokhmakhchi provide a poignant reflection from Dmytro Ieliseienko, a farmer who sustained injuries after running over a landmine while driving a tractor: “this is a very high price for bread, very high price”. It was not just the financial cost that the farmer meant. Today, there is a multiplicity of land dispossession in Ukraine, from occupation to landmines to the continuous destruction of the steppes through export-oriented monocrop farming.
At the same time, the significance of the Black Sea Grain deal and the global impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have often been represented by the developmentalist narratives of ‘starving children in Africa’. Yet, while Africa indeed relies on food imports, Olatunji Olaigbe argues that so do Europe and Asia: “global food security, not just Africa’s, is in danger”, he reminds us. The breadbasket imaginary appears to be perpetually caught in a twisted spiral of multiple dependencies and dispossessions, where life is conditioned by the death of another.
This article is an edited excerpt from ‘Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War’ by Darya Tsymbalyuk, published in March 2025 by Polity Press. Buy a copy by clicking here.
Darya Tsymbalyuk is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her work sits at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research, with writing published in the Journal of International Relations and Development, Nature Human Behaviour, and more.
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