On October 15, experts from our Association, Eduard Pleshko, Oleksii Plotnikov, Anna Prykhodko, and Borys Babin participated online in the “Fedorenko’s Readings,” an international conference held in Kharkiv by the Bokarius Forensic Science Institute. The event brought together representatives from the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice, the Office of the President, and the Constitutional Court, as well as experts from specialized scientific institutions in Armenia, Moldova, and Poland, alongside a broad academic community.
The discussion focused on research conducted by our experts in collaboration with Academician Ihor Krainov. This work addresses the specifics and methodology for investigating and legally classifying acts of ecocide committed by the Russian aggressors. It draws upon our Association’s research in this field, as well as materials gathered by our experts regarding the aggressor’s environmental atrocities in Crimea, other occupied territories, and the Azov and Black Seas.
The findings emphasize that an environmental catastrophe resulting from an act of ecocide cannot be defined solely by the geographical area affected, its monetary value, or the total loss of an ecosystem’s capacity for self-recovery. To assess such crimes, the study proposes a system of comprehensive criteria and a three-tiered expert investigation framework. This approach places particular emphasis on establishing threshold values for various types of ecosystems and developing a new legislative definition of ecocide. It is worth recalling that the findings of our experts regarding the investigation of ecocide in occupied territories have previously been featured in a number of UN reports, at OSCE and International Crimea Platform conferences, during sessions of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and in the monograph “Ecocide: Criminalizing Serious Harm against the Environment” , published this year in The Hague by the Asser Institute.
