The Promise Institute Europe Executive Director Kate Mackintosh and Faculty Director Máximo Langer are providing legal advice to the Ukrainian authorities on the prosecution of conflict-related environmental damage, which, unusually, are being given center stage in Ukraine’s high-level accountability strategies.

Russian aggression in Ukraine has devasted the country, its people, and not least its natural environment. The Ukrainian Office of the Prosecutor General (OPG) has identified a number of targeted attacks on objects containing dangerous forces, such as dams and nuclear facilities; on oil depots and other energy facilities; on special-value territories such as protected nature preserves, and on the country’s territorial waters as issues of potentially grave environmental concern. The United Nations Environment Program Rapid Environmental Assessment of the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam concludes, ‘without reservation … the Kakhovka dam breach is a far-reaching environmental disaster; the scale of which might not be clear for years or even decades to come.’ All told, the environmental consequences of hostilities have been extremely severe—and sometimes irreversible.

In January 2024, Kate Mackintosh was appointed to the International Council of Experts on the Investigation of Crimes Committed in Armed Conflict in Ukraine.