Environmental genocide: Retreating Russians may blow a massive titanium plant

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is already a human tragedy. But beyond the staggering casualties and civilian displacements, this war is also a story of unprecedented environmental sabotage. Vast swaths of farmland, once the world’s breadbasket, are now pocked with missile craters. Forests have been burnt and national parks destroyed. Explosive holes punched through dams, triggering massive flooding.

In February, Kyiv estimated that the environmental damage exacted by Russia’s war had exceeded 48 billion euros. As if the tab wasn’t high enough already, Vladimir Putin has reportedly set his sights on a massive titanium facility in the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula that Ukrainian intelligence said last month had been rigged to explode should Kremlin forces lose ground. The plant’s demolition would result in an ecological disaster “potentially worse than Chernobyl,” according to officials, owing to the site’s adjacency to a toxic acid reservoir.

The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident released over 400 times as much radioactive material as an atomic bomb, chasing hundreds of thousands from their homes in an area still classified as a deserted exclusion zone. I’ll never forget the horrors of that day and the months that followed. More than one hundred thousand people were evacuated from their homes. Whole towns left vacant as a chilling monument to Russian imperialism.

Now, 37 years later, the Kremlin means to do even worse to our people.

These are not the actions of a liberator, as the Russian president imagines himself. This is the work of a war criminal whose actions will scar and poison Ukraine’s landscape for generations.

Earlier this month, the Russian-controlled Kakhovka hydroelectric plant exploded. Its immediate collapse killed 10, leaving tens of thousands homeless and without drinking water. Experts pointed to intentional sabotage by Russians.

The GUR, Ukraine’s military intelligence service, said the dam’s failure had also critically disrupted the production processes at the nearby Crimean Titan plant in Armyansk. At its pre-invasion height, the sprawling facility was Eastern Europe’s largest titanium dioxide pigment producer. But as Ukraine’s counteroffensive has threatened Russia’s occupation of the peninsula, Putin’s troops reportedly began packing the facility with explosive mines a month ago.

I’ve spent 20 years in Ukraine’s titanium industry. There isn’t much in the mining and metallurgical processes you don’t learn in two decades, so you can trust me when I say that Russia’s detonation of a massive titanium dioxide pigment plant is a uniquely dangerous possibility. It would be one of the worst incidents of willful ecological genocide in human history, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last environmental casualty of Putin’s war.

Unlike the Chernobyl disaster, the threat in Crimea is not radioactive but chemical. Titanium pigment production demands significant amounts of ammonia, exposure to which can result in blindness, lung damage, or death in the high concentrations an explosion might cause.

This particular facility is capable of holding hundreds of tons of ammonia, which can be highly explosive when mixed with air and would act as a chemical force multiplier for Russian munitions.

The plant is also home to enormous quantities of sulfur, with a storage capacity of more than 17,000 tons. Sulfur is a highly flammable substance that can produce acid rain when it reacts with atmospheric vapor.

Another frightening vulnerability is a dam that divides sulfuric acid from a saltwater reservoir. If the site were to explode, the resulting combination of saltwater and sulfuric acid, along with the uncontrolled release of ammonia and sulfur dioxide, would choke the surrounding area for weeks if not months. Our air and groundwater would be poisoned.

The Russians understand that a titanium dioxide facility like Crimean Titan is a literal powder keg. Yet they have wired it to explode without regard for the environment or those who live nearby.

If Putin earnestly believed he was rescuing Crimea, why would he set fire to it? There’s a ready answer to that question: he is not, and he never was. His operation’s goal is to erase Ukraine from the map, not to liberate it. Because if Putin can’t have it, then no one can.

Andriy Brodsky is a critical minerals expert who serves as chief executive of Velta, a Ukrainian titanium feedstock producer unrelated to Crimean Titan.