What does it mean to conduct war environmentally? What materialities and assemblages are entangled in the environment of war? And how wide is the gap between political and legal conceptions of genocide? The war is bad; could anything be worse? This talk proposes a theorization of the "terror environment"—a realm in which civilian populations are double-targeted by both military violence and information warfare in the context of the Russian Federation's ongoing war against Ukraine. This environment is not merely the backdrop of war, but an active medium of destruction and manipulation, shaped through entangled infrastructures, ecological degradation, and psychological operations. The terror environment shapes—and ultimately produces—the subject of war.

The genesis of this terror environment itself can be traced to a nexus of ecocide and genocide, a convergence that predates the current full-scale invasion. It has crystallized most visibly through acts of energy terrorism, strategic infrastructural destruction, and targeted environmental catastrophes—ranging from Donbas and Chornobyl to Bucha and Kakhovka. These acts occur within a colonial and imperial context, in which Russia's aggressive actions follow a historical pattern of imperial terror, while simultaneously aligning with a hidden inter-imperial logic of deterrence—a geopolitical performance as much as a material assault.