The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment welcomes researchers Brian Milakovsky ’09 MF and Sergiy Zibtsev, visiting Fulbright Scholar at YSE from 2004-2005, for their virtual talk “Russia’s War and Ukraine’s Forests: Destruction and Resilience.” This Yale community and public facing webinar will explore how the current war is affecting Ukraine’s forests, specifically how Russia’s artillery war has been affecting the radiation-contaminated Chornobyl Exclusion Zone and the Siversky Donets River ecosystem of Eastern Ukraine over the past year. The Chornobyl Exclusion Zone is a landscape of forests, wetlands and depopulated communities contaminated by radiation after the nuclear power plant disaster of 1986. The Siversky Donets River is the longest river in eastern Ukraine and a longtime strategic line of transportation, water supply, and defense against Russian invasion. This webinar will focus on the social-environmental history and present day effects of war and climate change on these forest-steppe ecosystems and the people that live there. Using compelling photos and cartographic materials, Milakovsky and Zibtsev will illustrate the current environmental degradation of Ukraine, place it in the context of these forest-steppe ecosystems’ transformation over the past few centuries, and demonstrate how climate change and the wars of 2014-2015 and 2022-present are significantly accelerating fragmentation, fire, and overall decline. The hope is to provide insights on forest management for social and forest resilience to war, fire, and past mis-management.