Belligerent landscape boundaries of Ukraine

Belligerent (from beligero – wage war) landscapes have become an integral component of the modern-day landscape of Ukraine. Although they are widespread all across the country, they became a focus of researchers only in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The broad distribution and significant diversity of the belligerent landscape complexes in Ukraine allowed designating a number of belligerent territories and respective areas. The objective of the study was analyzing the formation, spatial arrangement, structure, and significance of belligerent lines in the structure of belligerent landscapes. To reach our goals, we employed both classic and specific approaches, principles, and methods. The specific methods included a simultaneous analysis of substantially different archeological, historical, relevant, and engineer data, etc. We used the research principles of historicism, complexity, natural-anthropogenic compatibility, and the methods such as analysis and synthesis, historical and landscape-scientific methods, aerographic, and as transparent mapping method we used the GIS technologies. We highlight that physical geographers and landscape scientists do not devote enough attention to belligerent landscape boundaries in Ukraine. The paper considers the formation and structure of the following belligerent landscape boundaries: the Trajan’s Walls, created by the Cherniakhiv tribes in the first and second centuries; the Serpent’s Walls, built in the times of the Kyivan Rus (ninth to eleventh centuries); and the belligerent landscape boundaries of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The landscape structure of defensive lines of the sides waging war in Ukraine continues to become more and more complex. Over the process of functioning, the belligerent landscape boundaries have been actively interacting with the neighboring territories, therefore creating complex belligerent interconnected dynamic landscape systems. The outer boundaries of those systems are hard to designate, since they are formed by both natural and socioeconomic conditions. This is especially relevant for belligerent landscape boundaries that have emerged in Ukraine from the first half of the twentieth to early twenty-first century. We outlined their features and significances in the structure of modern and future landscape of Ukraine and demonstrated the necessity of further in-detail research of belligerent landscape boundaries in Ukraine for the purposes of their rational use and protection after the active phase of operation.