The war in Ukraine and environmental security in Central European ministerial discourse

The purpose of the article is to compare ministerial discourses in terms of constructing the concept of environmental security and the significance of the environment itself in the situation of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Using speech act securitization analysis, statements issued by state offices from selected Central European countries were examined. The article analyzes ministerial statements published on the websites of six Ministries of the Environment: Ukrainian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian and Moldavian. The research covers the first five weeks of the war. Three types of entities have been considered in the analysis of archival materials: (1) those whose environmental security is at risk, (2) those that pose a threat, and (3) those that can restore this security. The analysis makes it possible to distinguish general types of entities, and thus to describe the similarities and differences between individual discourses, and present how the environment itself was perceived and how the construct of environmental safety was created in the context of other types of security.