Darya Tsymbalyuk on Russia's War in Ukraine and Learning to Listen to Multispecies Stories
Extractivism, Rupture, and Displacement in the Donbas, Toward Seeing the More-Than-Human-World
“All stories about war and displacement are profoundly multispecies.”[1] This terse opening line from one of Darya Tsymbalyuk’s recent essays about plant stories in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine is worth lingering with. If we can allow ourselves to hear and understand the meanings packed into this short sentence, we will make significant strides toward seeing ourselves as belonging to and in reciprocal, interdependent relations with the diverse biotic and abiotic interplay that constitutes the extraordinarily beautiful, elaborate, and complex ecosystems of our world. Many of Tsymbalyuk’s stories are geographically located in the Donbas region of Ukraine and focus on the various ways in which war and displacement fracture and destroy multispecies relations. In addition to humans, we are introduced to trees and plants and the stories that they tell and bear within their materiality, which, like humans and other animals, carry within and on their bodies the marks and injuries of war. For example, in 2019 she visited the Kreidova Flora nature research in Donetsk on a research trip, as the reserve is one of the few places in the country able to house and care for a particular species of relict pine trees (Pinus sylvestris var. cretacea Kalenich). The Kreidova Flora is named for its unique geological and botanical features, in particular, its chalk landscapes. The term “kreidova” comes from the word “kreida,” which means “chalk” in Ukrainian. Thus, the name draws attention to the chalk hills that populate the region. The Kreidova Flora preserve is a significant site owing to its unique ecosystem, which is home to a variety of rare and endemic plant species that are adapted to the area’s chalky soil conditions. Because of its unique flora, the reserve is a key site for botanical research and conservation.[2]
In 2019 Tsymbalyuk and her father were given a tour of the reserve by the director, Serhyy Lymansky. As they walked around the area, Serhyy and his team pointed to the marks left by the war that had begun in 2014. Her story then jumps to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, where once again the relict pines find themselves targets of bullets, missiles, and indiscriminate bombings and are at risk of losing their home. Serhyy’s home was decimated several months ago by a tank, and Tsymbalyuk’s father is now fighting in the Ukrainian armed forces to protect his family, country, and literally the soil, water, and relict pines of Ukraine. As an environmental humanities and postcolonial scholar, Tsymbalyuk contends that a proper understanding of the multiple ruptures caused by this war—including environmental ruptures and devastation—requires drawing on post- and decolonial hermeneutical insights. As she explains, “the region I have been studying, Donbas, has been at the heart of various Russian imperial projects. It is the place where the war started in 2014, and where intense combat is happening now. Studying the environments of Donbas means constantly untangling the logic of Russian imperialism, which operates through military-geologic extractivism. Russia’s war on Ukraine is a form of military-geologic extractivism too, where global petrocapitalism sponsors the war machine, and where the longer history of the region reflects the temporal depth of this violence.”[3] The term “extractivism” can be traced to Macarena Gómez-Barris’s book, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. In the context of Gómez-Barris’s work on the environmental destruction, economic exploitation, and social inequalities that constitute the legacy of colonial and imperial practices vis-à-vis different regions of Andean South America, she describes “extractivismo” as “an economic system that engages in thefts, borrowings, and forced removals, violently reorganizing social life as well as the land by thieving resources from Indigenous and Afro- descendent territories.”[4] There are obvious cultural, historical, geographical, and other differences between Gómez-Barris’s regional foci and Tsymbalyuk’s; however, their research shares a crucial common factor—namely, an imperial/colonial way of seeing, exploiting, and destroying the colonized other. This common factor allows Tsymbalyuk to creatively apply structural insights from Gómez-Barris to her own research on Donbas in order to show how past and present Tsarist Imperial, Soviet, and contemporary Russian colonizing practices are likewise rightly characterized as extractivist.
The Donbas has withstood a long history of Russian/Soviet imperial-colonial violence, rupture, and displacement dating back at least to the 17th century. However, by the time we reach the late 19th century, several Western colonial investors likewise want to cash in on the Donbas’ rich natural resources. According to Colleen McQuillen, the heart of Russia’s 19th-century industrialization effort was the development of extensive coal, mining, and metallurgical industries in the Donbas region for the purpose of harnessing its rich reserves of coal and iron ore. Eager to see their industrial project materialize, Russian imperial administrators were happy to recruit western investors and migrant workers. The first western investor was Welshman John Hughes, who, in 1869, established the New Russian Company for the Production of Coal, Iron, and Rails. In fact, what is today known by the name of Donetsk, was in the late 19th century called “Iuzovka,” which was a Russified version of “Hughes.”[5] Tsymbalyuk adds that the name, “Donbas, which stands for Donetsk Coal Basin, reflects the colonial logic of perceiving the region only as a resource, forged as a coal- and steel-producing industrial site. Extractivism turns human and nonhuman subjectivities into resources for fueling imperial desires.” In something of a counter-naming move, Tsymablyuk coined the term “fossilfeulisation” to describe this process of colonial/imperial extractive and exploitative othering.[6]
Those familiar with Martin Heidegger’s essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” may discern resonances with Heidegger’s critique of the particularly rigid enframing of modern technology, whereby the natural world is disclosed as a mere resource (Bestand). According to Heidegger, different historical epochs disclose or reveal (aletheuein) the world differently, which is not, for Heidegger, to claim that one epoch is more true than another. To illustrate, consider how the world was disclosed to a largely faith-permeated Middle Ages. Natural entities such as trees, flowers, cows, and even humans were revealed as God’s creation. That is each creature, including humans was understood in relation to God, as imitating God in their respective ways, and as having their telos in Him. As we move into the 20th century—i.e., the age of modern technology—entities begin, to use phenomenological language, to “show up” as standing-reserves or resources. Stated otherwise, they are no longer understood as objects (Gegenstände) with intrinsic properties but as that which awaits transformation, manipulation, and stockpiling for future use. With this new way of seeing the world, we have the associated values of flexibility, adaptability, and efficiency, and it becomes “natural” to modify, abuse, and exploit forests, oceans, steppes, cows, chickens, pigs, and so forth to satisfy human desires. Heidegger describes this new comportment as the expectation that things be “on call” and available for our use, whatever that use might be. In other words, instead of seeing a field as a field, it is seen as a potential housing development or site for a new Walmart Superstore.
Heidegger does not deny that previous ages had technologies of various sorts. The ancient Egyptians, for example, developed a wide range of tools and technologies enabling them to accomplish their agricultural work more efficiently and to create sophisticated and remarkable architectural structures. Heidegger’s claim, however, is that ancient and medieval technologies respected the integrity of things, working in harmony with a thing’s essence rather than violently transforming it into something fundamentally different. Yet, once we move into the age of modern technology, we comport ourselves toward the world in a manner that Heidegger calls a “challenging” (Herausforden), which “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such.”[7] As insightful as Heidegger’s analyses are, they, nonetheless fall short, owing to his failure to address the political and economic dimensions which play an integral role in seeing the world as nothing more than mere resources for human (ab)use. Thus, Tsymbalyuk’s research and reflections on the Donbas advances Heidegger’s insights and is decisively not silent concerning the political and economic ideologies and practices that structure our seeing the natural world as mere resources on call for our use, consumption, and exploitation.[8]
Tsymbalyuk discusses how Soviet colonial logic via its geological extractivism sees the Donbas as a mere energy resource to grow its industrial empire. To illustrate, she turns to a Soviet poster, which portrays the Donbas through an extractivist lens. At the top of the poster, we read, “Donbas is the heart of Russia.” Under these words, we see an old Soviet map of major cities. The Donbas is depicted as a beating heart with veins extended to key cities. The message is clear: from the heart (Donbas), blood (coal) flows to the various industrial hubs, providing and maintaining their life (energy).[9] [insert poster image “Donbas is the heart of Russia” here]. Sadly, in the 21st century the Donbas is still seen as a mere resource for the purposes of re-constructing Russia’s empire. As Tsymbalyuk explains, coal is no longer the sought-after prize for empire-building; however, ideologically spun false-narratives about Russia-speakers in the Donbas needing to be liberated from so-called Ukrainian Nazis fueled the war in 2014 and continues to be deployed today. Moreover, Russia uses other fossils, such as oil and natural gas, to fund their “war machine,” thus, “preserving the mechanism of extractivism” and the “murdering of colonial ‘others.’” Russia’s war against Ukraine has decimated and threatened the livelihood and very existence of villages, cities, flats, factories, forests, nature reserves, ecosystems, and relict pine trees. Rather than “liberate” the Donbas and its inhabitants and history, Russia has ruthlessly bombed the very industrial center it once extolled. “Empires are not static entities—they exist in an ongoing process of consolidation of power and domination. An imperial state such as Russia, formed out of different and diverse cultures, languages, and ecosystems needs to constantly reinvent itself in order to bring together different parts into one whole, one body. The Soviet Union has done it through imaginings of the proletariat and industrialization in which coal- and steel-producing Donbas was constructed and extracted as the heart of one big body. Current ideology reassembles the imperial body through the idea of russkiy mir, ‘Russian world,’ where the military attempts to incorporate desired parts into a perceived Russian cultural space.”[10] Russia’s attempt to re-construct its imperial body necessitates acts of violent against the people of Ukraine, as well as the plants, non-human animals, soil, and the dynamic biotic and abiotic texture that fashions their intricate ecosystems. Russian imperial-colonial violence against Ukraine is, unfortunately, nothing new. Tsymbalyuk’s work helps us to see how Russian/Soviet colonial extractivist logic sees the Donbas as nothing more than a resource to fuel, fund, and accomplish its imperial aims. Through her care-ful and creative research, Tsymbalyuk underscores the importance of decolonial and (post)colonial environmental work in helping us to better understand the multiple consequences of extractivist violence and fossilfuelization. By studying Russia’s (neo)imperialist and colonial history and practices, as well as extractivist violence at work in other countries, including the United States, we begin to grasp how such practices involve seeing the natural world (including humans) as mere resources with no intrinsic value and how this seeing as translates into actions that harm, ravage, and obliterate all others who resist its invasion or simply exist in its path. With respect to Russia’s war against Ukraine, as Tsymbalyuk states, “to think about the environments of Ukraine now means addressing petrocapitalist dependencies between Russia and the collective West.” And addressing these dependencies will involve those difficult conversations of which Zhadan spoke in Chapter 1. The West must get serious about its own participation in the “extractivist practices fueling this war” so that “we can start envisioning ways of recuperating the more-than-human worlds and relations that will survive.”[11]
[1] Tsymbalyuk, Darya, “I Dream of Seeing the Steppe Again: Plant Stories in the Context of Russia’s War on Ukraine,” 247.
[2] See, for example, Darya Tsymbalyuk, “I Dream of Seeing the Steppe Again,” 253–54. Tsymbalyuk notes that “the reserve is home to twenty-four endemic species, seven species being included in the European Red List of species threatened with extinction, and twenty-nine in the Red Data Book of Ukraine which documents endangered species.” One of the species under threat of extinction is the “Pinus sylvestris var. cretacea Kalenich, a relict species” (254). See also, Yuliia Spinova, Tetyana Kuchma, Iryna Vyshenska, “Pinus sylvestris L. var. cretacea Kalen. In The ‘Kreidova Flora’ Branch of Ukrainian Steppe Nature Reserve: Current State and Conservation Measures,” Journal of Environmental Research, Engineering and Management 75 (2019): 40–46. DOI: 10.5755/j01.erem.75.4.23858.
[3] Tsymbalyuk, Darya, “What Does It Mean to Study Environments in Ukraine Now?” May 15, 2023; DOI: 10.5282/rec/9494.
[4] Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone, xvii.
[5] McQuillen, “The Imperial Underground,” 166.
[6] Tsymbalyuk, Darya, “What Does It Mean to Study Environments in Ukraine Now?” May 15, 2023; DOI: 10.5282/rec/9494.
[7] Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, 320.
[8] See also, Asia Bazdyrieva, “No Milk, No Love,” E-Flux Journal, no. 127 (May 2022); https://www.e-flux.com/journal/127/465214/no-milk-no-love/. Bazdyrieva’s essay discusses what she calls the “resourcification” of Ukraine, which is a “process that sees Ukraine—its territory, natural resources, and people—as an operational space, merely a site for material transaction.”
[9] Tsymbalyuk, Darya, “What Does It Mean to Study Environments in Ukraine Now?” May 15, 2023; DOI: 10.5282/rec/9494.
[10] Tsymbalyuk, Darya, “What Does It Mean to Study Environments in Ukraine Now?” May 15, 2023; DOI: 10.5282/rec/9494.
[11] Tsymbalyuk, Darya, “What Does It Mean to Study Environments in Ukraine Now?” May 15, 2023; DOI: 10.5282/rec/9494.