“Donetsk Chornobyl”: Deep Time of the Elemental Warfare

“Donetsk Chornobyl” traces the layered histories and contemporary resonances of the 1979 industrial underground nuclear explosion beneath the Ukrainian city of Yunokomunarivsk, now, Bunhe / Бунге, currently under Russian occupation. The explosion, known as Object Klivazh, was the 530th nuclear detonation conducted on the territory of the USSR. Drawing on the notion of vertical occupation as an enduring ecological footprint that imposes a necropolitical regime on local communities, I examine how the legacies of Soviet wastelanding are reactivated in Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. The case of Object Klivazh compels us to expand the conceptualization of war beyond visible surface fronts and to reckon with deep temporalities, subterranean infrastructures, and the slow unfolding of toxic durations, further intensified by landscapes warped through continuous shelling. Waste emerges here not as collateral but as an active agent, structuring environments both in the time of so-called peace and as a constitutive element of warfare itself. Situating this case within a broader account of contemporary warfare as environmental and atmospheric occupation, the talk considers how modern violence increasingly targets the elemental conditions that sustain life, such as air, soil, and water, along with the infrastructures that support them.

Svitlana Matviyenko is an Associate Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication of Simon Fraser University. Her research and teaching, informed by science & technology studies and history of science, are focused on information and cyberwar, media and environment, critical infrastructure studies and postcolonial and decolonial theory. Matviyenko’s current work on nuclear cultures & heritage investigates the practices of nuclear terror, weaponization of pollution and technogenic catastrophes during the Russian war in Ukraine. Matviyenko is a co-editor of two collections, The Imaginary App (MIT Press, 2014) and Lacan and the Posthuman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is a co-author of Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2019).

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