The people of Ukraine won’t soon forget the summer of 2025, a period that saw a significant increase in Russian attacks on the country, including the largest number of drones sent to kill and terrorize Ukrainians.
This summer farmers witnessed another invasion of their lands — a locust outbreak that devastated crops across southern and eastern Ukraine.
Videos shared with The Revelator show swarms of locusts — each as wide as a human hand — ravaging fields of sunflowers and corn in the Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Kherson, and Odesa regions, adding to the dangerous effects of war on these ecosystems.
It’s not a coincidence that the regions most affected by the outbreak are among those experiencing some of the worst fighting.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered an environmental crisis, experts say, that is manifesting in the rise of invasive species.
“The fields with proper agrotechnical tillage are not conducive to laying eggs for the locusts,” says Andriy Fedorenko, a senior researcher at the Institute of Grain Crops of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences in Ukraine, who spent several weeks this summer researching the breeding patterns of locusts in the affected regions. “But abandoned agricultural lands and dried-up ponds are ideal.”
He says the locusts have gained a foothold in vast farmlands made unusable by the Russian invasion, as well as the area affected by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam.
The Soviet-era structure on the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine was bombed on June 6, 2023, causing flooding in several towns on its banks along with mass casualties.
Fedorenko observed that the dam’s destruction had disrupted regional ecosystems. The addition of dry weather and the increase in military activity led to a locust outbreak, he says.
In photos and videos shared from the field, Fedorenko offered evidence of how flooding created optimal conditions for an outbreak — a conclusion shared by other scientists.
“Receding floodwaters exposed large moist areas, optimal spots for egg laying and feeding,” Stanislav Viter, a researcher with the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Group, wrote in a recent report. He noted that the wetland reed beds, saturated with floodwaters, provided fodder to the pests.
“A single locust consumes vegetation equivalent to 1–1.5 times its weight every day,” Viter wrote. Crop fields “flooded and abandoned because of the war as well as on the bed of the former Kakhovka Reservoir” offered just that.
Locusts also need favorable climate conditions — very high temperatures — to breed. Climate change may have furthered their recent reproductive success.
“The temperature regime in total over two years, particularly in 2024, has also been extremely high compared to previous years,” says Fedorenko. In 2024 the temperatures across the fertile steppes were the highest in the past 10 years. “The average temperature increased by 1.1°C and 3.9°C in the past decade,” he says.
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