LONDON — Analysts who have been tracking Russia’s widespread and increasingly elaborate hybrid war campaign against Europe — including espionage plots, sabotage attacks and waves of drone incursions over sensitive sites — warn that Moscow is working on another weapon to deploy against adversaries: the weather.
Ukraine, a globally important grain producer, has voiced concerns that Russia could use subtle weather manipulation techniques to attack its vital agricultural sector, even if the current peace negotiations bring an end to the shooting war between the two nations.
“Russia’s potential use of solar geo-engineering as a hybrid warfare tool is no longer science fiction but a real risk,” said Andrii Sava, an organizer of the Ukraine Reconstruction Summit and an agribusiness expert. “A regime that has repeatedly ignored all norms could easily attempt to exploit climate technologies for destabilization. The world must recognize this threat and establish oversight mechanisms before such technologies become a new instrument of chaos.”
The Ukrainians aren’t the only ones speaking out.
Russia and China are at the forefront of a group of nations investing in geo-engineering capabilities, according to the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank that has studied the growing threat of “weather warfare.”
Research into the technologies and systems needed to manipulate weather patterns for strategic or military purposes has been conducted in recent years under the guise of climate study, the institute reported.
The institute, Britain’s oldest defense think tank, issued a sobering alert on weather weaponization this year. It warned that “Moscow could seek to induce climate extremes, such as drought or flooding, by deploying solar geo-engineering technologies against an adversary, disrupting agricultural production and the operation of critical infrastructure.”
Russia has been dramatically expanding and sponsoring aggressive hybrid attacks across Europe.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk denounced a Nov. 17 explosion that destroyed a vital rail line used to supply Ukraine. Mr. Tusk called it an “unprecedented act of sabotage.”
Officials later said two people arrested in the incident were working for Moscow.
It was the most dramatic example of Russian sabotage in a NATO member state since the invasion of Ukraine almost four years ago. For months, Russia had been testing NATO air defenses with drone intrusions in several NATO states.
Moscow also has been accused of interfering in European elections, fomenting unrest with online disinformation and ramping up espionage efforts across the continent.
Weaponizing the weather — seeding clouds to cause floods or creating air or ground pollution to destroy crops — is one more tool for a country willing to conduct hybrid warfare, analysts say.
“The environment is not collateral damage. It is a new front line of hybrid warfare, and defending it is quite literally defending life itself,” said Ruslan Spirin, a Ukrainian diplomat based in Kyiv.
Technologies such as cloud seeding date to the 1940s. Efforts remain imprecise and could backfire, though that has not slowed Russia.
The Royal United Services Institute’s report said Russia’s willingness to disrupt or damage the water supplies of its enemies extends to NATO states, including the attempted sabotage this year of a water supply facility on a Swedish island.
Russia has targeted Ukraine’s water supply in an attempt to limit its agricultural capacity. The destruction of the Kakhovka Reservoir in southern Ukraine on June 6, 2023, caused as much as $11 billion in damage. The long-term impact goes beyond flooding and infrastructure damage, experts say. Ukrainian farmland, which relied on the reservoir, now risks becoming a semi-desert. As recently as 2021, about 4 million tons of grains and oilseeds were produced in that area of Ukraine. That same year, Ukraine produced some 45 million tons of grain overall.
Russia plans to dominate global grain markets. Every ton of production that Russia can eliminate is a win for its industry and its postwar recovery plans.
Russia’s interest in manipulating the weather is not new. Russia unveiled a special airplane designed for cloud seeding operations in 2013 on the eve of its initial invasion of Ukraine. Media reports said the plane was deployed in Crimea in 2020.
In theory, Russia could conduct cloud seeding missions within Russia or Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine that would hamper Ukrainian agriculture, impact military logistics or complicate the removal of land mines without technically violating a ceasefire.
The best-known example of weather warfare was Operation Popeye, when the United States sowed rain along trails used by North Vietnam to infiltrate South Vietnam. Russian media outlets accused the United States of using “climate warfare” against Crimea in 2023 when an unusually severe storm battered the peninsula.
“Conspiracy narratives about ‘Ukrainian sabotage’ or about ‘climate chaos’ allegedly caused by Western polities. The goal is confusion — to paralyze decision-making, fragment solidarity and make accountability impossible,” Mr. Spirin said.
He suggested that Russian assaults that change Ukraine’s environment should be treated as war crimes.
“We should build a coalition of environmental accountability, linking the [European Union], Black Sea and Danube states and partners in Latin America and the Caribbean — regions that already understand the human costs of meteorological and ecological disasters,” Mr. Spirin said.
The United States, Russia and China agreed to abandon the use of weather as a weapon of war under the Environmental Modification Convention of 1978. Other world leaders, such as those from France and Israel, have not acceded to the agreement. These countries and many others continue to develop geo-engineering for peaceful purposes, though the line between the two is increasingly blurred, as the case of China demonstrates.
“China’s efforts at cloud seeding in Tibet have comprehensive national security implications not only for India, but several countries in the lower riparian geographies of rivers emerging out of the Hindu Kush, Himalayas and Karakoram,” said Chaitanya Giri, a fellow with India’s Observer Research Foundation, where he studies the national security implications of emerging technologies.
Cloud seeding allows China to shift ecologies in manners that suit the Chinese Communist Party at the expense of traditional herding in Tibet and the traditional oasis economy in Xinjiang, home to China’s restive Uyghur Muslim population. In the Xinjiang province (known as East Turkistan to the Uyghurs), considerable emphasis is placed on harvesting cotton, a crop that is water- and labor-intensive.
“The cotton fields of East Turkistan are not just sites of agricultural activity,” said Rushan Abbas, founder of Campaign for Uyghurs. “They are sites of systematic oppression, economic exploitation and a deeply disturbing social experiment in forced assimilation.”
China’s geo-engineering operations have focused on pollution control, drought relief and event protection. China used modified anti-aircraft cannons and airplanes to deliver payloads of silver iodide into the atmosphere in 2008. The goal was to ensure rain ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympics, not during the opening ceremony.
The Soviet Union pursued a similar operation before the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
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