Oleg Dyakov, a rewilding officer from Rewilding Ukraine’s head office in Odesa and one of the organization’s cofounders, recounts the hazards his teams have faced with a casual frustration. The war, unsurprisingly, has made conservation a lot harder. Water buffalo, once believed to be permanently wiped out across eastern Europe, were reintroduced on the Danube Delta in 2021. Within a few years, a handful of cornerstone species, including marmots, red and fallow deer, wild hamsters, and koniks-ponies thought to be distant descendants of the now extinct European wild horse-were once again roaming the countryside. Rewilding Ukraine started up in 2017, founded by a small group of veteran conservationists. Rewilding-a practice based on reintroducing species to a landscape in the hope of encouraging a broader rehabilitation of its ecosystem-is a relatively new phenomenon in Ukraine. Some of those projects have continued to thrive despite Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and their backers say they could provide a blueprint for the country’s postwar recovery. Rewilding projects, like this one, started on the steppe four years ago by Rewilding Ukraine-an offshoot from the pan-European organization, Rewilding Europe-are an attempt to reverse decades of damage and return ecosystems to their natural states. But decades of political and industrial upheaval, intensive farming, and unregulated hunting have led to the destruction of ecosystems and the extinction of species, including the kulan. Although Ukraine occupies less than 6 percent of Europe’s land mass, it’s home to 35 percent of the continent’s biodiversity, according to the Convention on Biological Diversity.
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