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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Ukrainian musicians respond to wartime ecocide through songs that blend environmental awareness, cultural memory, and activism. Through lyrics, visuals, and fundraising efforts, they transform music into a medium of ecological and humanitarian resilience.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the Ukrainian popular music scene engages with ecological devastation—ecocide—as both subject and symbol in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion after 2022. Drawing on recent songs, videos, and public campaigns by Ukrainian artists, I show how music functions as a powerful medium of environmental witnessing and resilience.

In the wake of massive destruction of ecosystems, forests, rivers, and farmlands, Ukrainian singers have been creating songs that foreground the interconnection between human and wildlife suffering and the wounded landscape. These works merge affective storytelling with activism: by involving documentary pictures and sounds of the destructions, they visualize scorched fields, polluted waters, and blackened skies while raising funds for environmental and humanitarian relief. Through their digital circulation on YouTube, Instagram, and Telegram, these songs operate as ecological counter-narratives to wartime disinformation, foregrounding the agency of nature as both victim and witness of violence. These artists transform ecological catastrophe into a shared space of mourning, solidarity, and hope—recasting music as a site of environmental memory and resistance.

By situating the contemporary Ukrainian popular music scene within broader folklore and narrative traditions that personify nature as a moral and affective force, this paper argues that wartime music performs a plural function: it commemorates loss while simultaneously envisioning and mobilizing regeneration.