Fourteen out of 222 criminal proceedings on Russian war crimes against the environment have been provisionally qualified as an ecocide, said Svitlana Hrynchuk, Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources.

"More than 6,000 cases of environmental damage as a result of the war have already been recorded. The Prosecutor General’s Office (PGO) is investigating 222 criminal proceedings on war crimes against the environment, 14 of them are preliminarily qualified as ecocide (Article 441 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine)," Hrynchuk said in an interview with Interfax–Ukraine.

According to her, Ukraine has already begun the process of registering cases of harm to nature in the International Register of Damages, and its partners agree that this work should be aimed not only at compensating for damage to Ukraine, but also at developing international mechanisms to prevent cases of ecocide and environmental damage from military actions in the future.

"It is clear that this process is not fast. But we can become the first country in the world to work out approaches that will be useful to the international community," the minister stressed.