There is a point in every long war where numbers begin to lose their grip. They still matter, of course, but they can also become anaesthetic. Ukraine’s Ministry of Economy, drawing on figures from the State Environmental Inspectorate, has put verified environmental losses from Russia’s full-scale invasion at UAH 6.01 trillion. The same accounting warns that, as of December 2025, around 3 million tonnes of harmful substances are spreading across Europe, entering the atmosphere and soil as a result of shell explosions, strikes on oil depots and industrial facilities, and attacks on critical infrastructure.

Read those sentences twice and you begin to see the problem. The scale is so large that it risks becoming familiar.

Ecocide is not a metaphor

There is a temptation, especially in capitals far from the front line, to treat ecocide as an issue area. Something for environment ministries, NGOs, and conference panels to ultimately worry about. Something that can be filed under climate and biodiversity and returned to when the more urgent business of security has been dealt with. But this war has erased the line between the two.

We live in a world where outrage competes with the next alert on a phone screen. The result is a dangerous bargain: we convince ourselves we can be tired of the war without becoming complicit in its outcomes. That complacency is not neutral. Because if Europe absorbs ecocide into the background noise of conflict, it quietly accepts a new baseline: that large-scale environmental destruction is tolerable if the geopolitics are complicated enough, if the war lasts long enough, or if voters are tired enough.

That baseline will not stay contained to Ukraine. Normalising ecocide normalises impunity. It signals that poisoning land, burning protected areas, and making ecosystems unliveable can be folded into the cost of doing business. It lowers the political price of future environmental crimes, by any actor, anywhere.

It also corrodes Europe’s own credibility. You cannot speak about biodiversity targets, nature restoration, and climate resilience while looking away from the deliberate wrecking of ecosystems on the continent’s eastern flank. Not without hollowing out the entire project.

This is the quiet power of Nature on Fire. It does not shout policy. It simply refuses the idea that we can move on.

In the weeks leading into the 24th February, as Europe reaches for its stock phrases about solidarity, Ukrainian artists, animal rights organisation UAnimals with the support of ISAR Ednannia have placed something more intimate, and more difficult, inside Ukrainian diplomatic spaces across Europe: art that insists the war is also being waged on soil, forests, water, and the living fabric that has no passport. The installations make a simple argument. If the public has stopped listening to numbers, then the work must speak in symbols that bypass the fatigue.

In Bratislava, Tree of Memory uses portraits of animals killed by the war, anchored in real stories gathered by the artist, to make one point unavoidable: mass harm does not require intent towards animals to be real, and it does not become less criminal because the victims are non-human.

 In Prague, artist Marysia Prus presents Disappearance, a series of transparent fabrics bearing images of plants and animals, symbolising the fragility of nature and the gradual extinction of species in occupied territories. What disappears is not only an animal or a plant, but a set of relationships that took centuries to form.