The Ocean of Green: Hogweed Against Russian World

Heracleum sosnowskyi (Sosnowsky’s hogweed, or just Hogweed) is considered a growing ecological problem in Russia at least since the 2010s. The plant’s feral invasion creates a predicament interpreted by some scientists and civil activists as an “emergency” or even “apocalypse.” However, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this apocalyptic rhetoric has been supplemented by ideological stamps from Russian propaganda: Hogweed is a “biological weapon” and a “brotherly help from America” that “Mother Russia” must be protected from. Given all these facts, it is hard to see any Russian environmental security measures just as “measures”; rather, a new—ideological and military—front is opening up, this time in the name of a fight against the nonhuman. By focusing in this article on the ideo-logical rather than biological aspect of Hogweed trouble, I want to show how the anti-Hogweed civil war transforms into a special plant operation; and in which way nature and culture, material and ideal, Soviet Union and the Russian world are involved in both the ecological and ideological formation of contemporary Putinism.