Direct military actions and their indirect effects carry profound consequences for nature, resulting in destruction, environmental violence, and ecocide. The imperial war inflicted by Russia on eastern Ukraine since 2014, and further extended as a full-scale invasion of the country, unfolding since 24 February 2022, is a prime example. In spring 2024, over two years after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian artist and designer Polina Choni and Polish-Swedish environmental humanities researcher Marietta Radomska, engaged in a conversation focused on Polina’s artistic practice and select art projects. Polina’s work, both embedded in and simultaneously resisting the conditions of the present, forms a poetic yet powerful response to violence and destruction. What comes through, seemingly unnoticed, in-between the lines of Polina’s art and this conversation is the historical context of Central and Eastern Europe, with the mark of wars and genocides, unleashed on the region by Nazism and Stalinism, and the related trauma that spills over through generations. Choni’s artworks are never only about the here and now. And yet, the conversation focuses on what it means to engage in creative and artistic practices in times of war-induced environmental harm, ecocide, and uncertainty.