Toxins in soil, blasted forests – Ukraine counts cost of Putin’s ‘ecocide’

Kateryna Polyanska, an ecologist and analyst, collects a soil sample from a bomb crater outside the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv. Photograph: Misha Lubarsky/The Observer

The woods outside Chernihiv were quiet in late August when Anatoliy Pavelko scrambled into a 10-metre bomb crater with a trowel and an icebox full of sample jars. He wanted to find out what the Russian FAB-250 bomb left behind when it carved this gaping hole into the ground in the spring.

Four months earlier, the environmental lawyer was dug in on a frontline just a few kilometres away, shells crashing around him in the bitter fight to keep Russian forces out of Kyiv.