In February 2022, as Russia marched on Kyiv, Oleksandr Dmitriev realized he knew how to stop Moscow’s men: Blow a hole in the dam that strangled the Irpin River northeast of the capital and restore the long-lost boggy floodplain.

A defense consultant who organized offroad races in the area before the war, Dmitriev was familiar with the terrain. He knew exactly what reflooding the river basin — a vast expanse of bogs and marshes that was drained in Soviet times — would do to Russia’s war machinery. 

“It turns into an impassable turd, as the jeep guys say,” he said. He told the commander in charge of Kyiv’s defense as much, and was given the go-ahead to blow up the dam. 

Dmitriev’s idea worked. “In principle, it stopped the Russian attack from the north,” he said. The images of Moscow’s tanks mired in mud went around the world. 

Three years later, this act of desperation is inspiring countries along NATO’s eastern flank to look into restoring their own bogs — fusing two European priorities that increasingly compete for attention and funding: defense and climate. 

That’s because the idea isn’t only to prepare for a potential Russian attack. The European Union’s efforts to fight global warming rely in part on nature’s help, and peat-rich bogs capture planet-warming carbon dioxide just as well as they sink enemy tanks. 

Yet half of the EU’s bogs are being sapped of their water to create land suitable for planting crops. The desiccated peatlands in turn release greenhouse gases and allow heavy vehicles to cross with ease. 

Some European governments are now wondering if reviving ailing bogs can solve several problems at once. Finland and Poland told POLITICO they were actively exploring bog restoration as a multi-purpose measure to defend their borders and fight climate change. 

Poland’s massive 10 billion złoty (€2.3 billion) Eastern Shield border fortification project, launched last year, “provides for environmental protection, including by … peatland formation and forestation of border areas,” the country’s defense ministry said in a statement. 

“It’s a win-win situation that achieves many targets at the same time,” said Tarja Haaranen, director general for nature at Finland’s environment ministry. 

Bogs! What are they good for? 

In their pristine state, bogs are carpeted with delicate mosses that can’t fully decompose in their waterlogged habitats and slowly turn into soft, carbon-rich soil known as peat. 

This is what makes them Earth’s most effective repositories of CO2. Although they cover only 3 percent of the planet, they lock away a third of the world’s carbon — twice the amount stored in forests. 

Yet when drained, bogs start releasing the carbon they stored for hundreds or thousands of years, fueling global warming. 

Some 12 percent of peatlands worldwide are degraded, producing 4 percent of planet-warming pollution. (To compare, global aviation is responsible for around 2.5 percent.)

In Europe, where bogs were long regarded as unproductive terrain to be converted into farmland, the picture is especially dramatic: Half of the EU’s peatlands are degraded, mostly due to drainage for agricultural purposes.

As a result, EU countries reported 124 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution from drained peatlands in 2022, close to the annual emissions of the Netherlands. Some scientists say even this is an underestimate. 

Various peatland restoration projects are now underway, with bog repair having gained momentum under the EU’s new Nature Restoration Law, which requires countries to revive 30 percent of degraded peatlands by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050. 

The bloc’s 27 governments now have until September 2026 to draft plans on how they intend to meet these targets. 

On NATO’s eastern flank, restoring bogs would be a relatively cheap and straightforward measure to achieve EU nature targets and defense goals all at once, scientists argue. 

“It’s definitely doable,” said Aveliina Helm, professor of restoration ecology at the University of Tartu, who until recently advised Estonia’s government on its EU nature repair strategy.

“We are right now in the development of our national restoration plan, as many EU countries are,” she added, “and as part of that I see great potential to join those two objectives.” 

NATO’s bog belt 

As it happens, most of the EU’s peatlands are concentrated on NATO’s border with Russia and Kremlin-allied Belarus — stretching from the Finnish Arctic through the Baltic states, past Lithuania’s hard-to-defend Suwałki Gap and into eastern Poland. 

When waterlogged, this terrain represents a dangerous trap for military trucks and tanks. In a tragic example earlier this year, four U.S. soldiers stationed in Lithuania died when they drove their 63-ton M88 Hercules armored vehicle into a bog. 

And when armies can’t cross soggy open land, they are forced into areas that are more easily defended, as Russia found out when Dmitriev and his soldiers blew up the dam north of Kyiv in February 2022. 

“The Russians there in armored personnel carriers got stuck at the entrance, then they were killed with a Javelin [anti-tank missile], then when the Russians tried to build pontoons … ours shot them with artillery,” Dmitriev recounted. 

Bog-based defense isn’t a new idea. Waterlogged terrain has stopped troops throughout European history — from Germanic tribes inflicting defeat on Roman legions by trapping them beside a bog in 9 AD, to Finland’s borderlands ensnaring the Soviets in the 1940s. The treacherous marshes north of Kyiv posed a formidable challenge to armies in both world wars. 

Strategically rewetting drained peatlands to prepare for an enemy attack, however, would be a novelty. But it’s an idea that’s starting to catch on — among environmentalists, defense strategists and politicians. 

Pauli Aalto-Setälä, a lawmaker with Finland’s governing National Coalition Party, last year filed a parliamentary motion calling on the Finnish government to restore peatlands to secure its borders and fight climate change. 

“In Finland, we have used our nature from a defense angle in history,” said Aalto-Setälä, who holds the rank of major and trained as a tank officer during his national service. “I realized that at the eastern border especially, there are a lot of excellent areas to restore — for the climate, but also to make it as difficult to go through as possible.” 

The Finnish defense and environment ministries will now start talks in the fall on whether to launch a bog-repair pilot project, according to Haaranen, who will lead the working group. “I’m personally very excited about this.”

Poland’s peaty politics

Discussions on defensive nature restoration are advancing fastest in Poland — even though Warsaw is usually reluctant to scale up climate action. 

Climate activists and scientists started campaigning for nature-based defense a few years ago when they realized that Poland’s politicians were far more likely to spend financial and political capital on environmental efforts when they were linked to national security. 

“Once you talk about security, everyone listens right now in Poland,” said Wiktoria Jędroszkowiak, a Polish activist who helped initiate the country’s Fridays for Future climate protests. “And our peatlands and ancient forests, they are the places that are going to be very important for our defense once the war gets to Poland as well.” 

After years of campaigning, the issue has now reached government level in Warsaw, with discussions underway between scientists and Poland’s defense and environment ministries. 

Wiktor Kotowski, an ecologist and member of the Polish government’s advisory council for nature conservation, said initial talks with the defense ministry have been promising. 

“There were a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions but in general we found there are only synergies,” he said.

“What the ministry of defense wants is to get back as many wetlands as possible along the eastern border,” Kotowski added. “And that is what is required from the point of view of nature restoration and climate as well.” 

Cezary Tomczyk, a state secretary at Poland’s defense ministry, agreed. “Our objectives align,” he said. “For us, nature is an ally, and we want to use it.” 

Just … don’t drain the swamp 

Governments in the Baltics have shown little interest so far. Only Lithuania’s environment ministry said that defense-linked wetland restoration “is currently under discussion,” declining to offer further details. 

Estonia’s defense ministry and Latvia’s armed forces said that new Baltic Defence Line plans to fortify the three countries’ borders would make use of natural obstacles including bogs, but did not involve peatland restoration. 

Yet scientists see plenty of potential, given that peatlands cover 10 percent of the Baltics. And in many cases, the work would be straightforward, said Helm, the Estonian ecologist. 

“We have a lot of wetlands that are drained but still there. If we now restore the water regime — we close the ditches that constantly drain them and make them emit carbon — then they are relatively easy to return to a more natural state,” she said. 

Healthy peatlands serve as havens for wildlife: Frogs, snails, dragonflies and specialized plant species thrive in the austere conditions of bogs, while rare birds stop by to nest. They also act as barriers to droughts and wildfires, boosting Europe’s resilience to climate change. 

The return of this flora and fauna takes time. But ending drainage not only puts a fast stop to pollution — it also instantly renders the terrain impassable.

As long as the land isn’t completely drained, “it’s one or two years and you have the wetland full of water,” said Kotowski, the Polish ecologist. “Restoration is a difficult process from an ecological point of view, but for water retention, for stopping emissions and for difficulty to cross — so for defensive purposes — it’s pretty straightforward and fast.” 

And at a time when Europe’s focus has shifted to security, with defense budgets surging and in some cases diverting money from the green transition, environmentalists hope that military involvement could unlock unprecedented funding and speed up nature restoration. 

“At the moment, it takes five years to obtain approval for peatland rewetting, and sometimes it can take 10 years,” said Franziska Tanneberger, director of Germany’s Greifswald Mire Centre, a leading European peatlands research institute. “When it comes to military activities, there is a certain prioritization. You can’t wait 10 years if we need it for defense.” 

The tractor factor 

But that doesn’t mean there’s no resistance to the idea. 

In Estonia, the environment ministry halted one peatland restoration effort earlier this year amid fierce opposition from locals who worried that rewetting would lead to flooding and forest destruction. Scientists described such concerns as unfounded. 

The biggest threat to peatlands is agriculture — an awkward reality for EU governments desperate to avoid drawing the ire of farmers. 

In both Finland and Poland, any initial defensive restoration projects are likely to focus on state-owned land, sidestepping this conflict for now. But scientists argue that if countries are serious about large-scale bog repair, they have to talk to farmers.

“This will not work without involving agricultural lands,” said Kotowski, the Polish ecologist. A whopping 85 percent of the country’s peatlands are degraded, in most cases because they have been drained to plant crops where water once pooled. 

“What we badly need is a program for farmers, to compensate them for rewetting these drained peatlands — and not only compensate, to let them earn money from it,” he added.  

There are plants that can be harvested from restored peatlands, such as reeds for use in construction or packaging. Yet for now, the market for such crops in Europe is too small to incentivize farmers to switch. 

The bogs-for-defense argument also doesn’t work for all countries. In Germany, where more than 90 percent of peatlands are drained, the Bundeswehr sounded reluctant when asked about the idea. 

“The rewetting of wetlands can be both advantageous and disadvantageous for [NATO’s] own operations,” depending on the individual country, a spokesperson for the Bundeswehr’s infrastructure and environment office said. 

NATO troops would need to move through Germany in the event of a Russian attack in the east, and bogs restrict military movements. Still, “the idea of increasing the obstacle value of terrain by causing flooding and swamping … has been used in warfare for a very long time and is still a viable option today,” the spokesperson said. 

Bogging down Putin

Scientists are quick to acknowledge that a bogs-for-security approach can’t solve everything. 

“Of course we still need traditional defense. This isn’t meant to replace that,” said Tanneberger, who also advises a company that recently drew up a detailed proposal for defense-linked peatland restoration. 

Bogs can’t stop drones or shoot down missiles, and war isn’t good for nature — or conservation efforts. 

And in Ukraine, the flooding of the Irpin basin was economically and ecologically destructive. 

Among outside observers, there was initial excitement about the prospect of a new natural paradise. But villagers in the region lost their lands and homes, and the influx of water had a negative effect on local species that had no time to adapt to the sudden change. 

“Yes, it stopped the invasion of Kyiv, and this was badly needed, so no criticism here. But it did result in environmental damage,” said Helm, the Estonian ecologist. 

Unlike Ukraine, EU governments have the chance to restore peatlands with care, taking into account the needs of nature, farmers and armies. 

“Perhaps it’s better to think ahead instead of being forced to act in a hurry,” she said. “We have this opportunity. Ukraine didn’t.” 

Zia Weise reported from Brussels, Wojciech Kość from Warsaw and Veronika Melkozerova from Kyiv.