“We are youth climate activists usually fighting a crisis we didn’t cause, now finding ourselves at the frontlines of a war we didn’t start,” read the first part of a tweet posted by Fridays for Future Ukraine on March 1.

Most of the media coverage of Putin’s attack on Ukraine frames the war in terms of a geopolitical border dispute, or one tyrant’s quest to reclaim part of Russia’s former imperium. But to activists on the ground — activists like Ilyess El Kortbi and Anastasiia Onufriv, who have been rallying for climate justice in a country that has been threatened by Russia since 2014 — the war against Ukraine represents a much bigger story. Modern war, they say, is almost always a fight for fossil fuels, and it’s a fight that kills some immediately with bombs and bullets and may ultimately kill the rest of us from catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Ilyess El Kortbi is a Morrocan-Ukranian climate activist now living in a shelter somewhere near Ukraine’s border with Europe. He can’t disclose where, because he is hiding. Having lost his Moroccan passport, El Kortbi has no chance of leaving Ukraine for now. While he doesn’t really want to leave, he doesn’t want to be conscripted into the Ukrainian army either.

“I am a humanitarian volunteer,” El Kortbi told Earth Island Journal. “I don’t want to join the army. I don’t want to kill people.”

El Kortbi acts as the board secretary for Fridays for Future Ukraine, and from the relative safety of his shelter, he continues to coordinate with contacts throughout Ukraine and Poland to help protect LGBTQI and climate activists as well as women and children. He arranges transport for refugees to Ukraine’s border, and helps them find contacts and supplies after they cross over.

Despite his own hands-on involvement in the present war in Ukraine, El Kortbi expresses an understanding of conflict as a global phenomenon.

“It’s no different than what happened in Iraq a decade ago, or in Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya,” El Kortbi said. “We were thinking, Why is it happening here? And we found that it’s really simple. Putin wants money, so he needs fossil fuels.”

Within Ukraine specifically, there are oil reserves in the Black Sea (near Crimea), and there are black coal deposits in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region — both of these fossil fuel-rich regions happen to be the first areas that Putin annexed (Crimea in 2014 and Donbass at the start of the current invasion).

“These are resources we no longer need,” El Kortbi said. “Fossil fuels cause climate change, and now we can clearly see they also cause wars.”

In Germany, Economy Minister Robert Habeck underscored the potential to move beyond fossil fuels last week when he said Germany can meet its energy needs without Russian gas, noting that the country hopes to speed up the transition to renewable energy sources. (Russia supplies Germany with nearly 55 percent of its natural gas, most of which is used for heating. On February 22, Germany halted the approval of the completed Nord Stream 2 undersea gas pipeline, which would double the amount of gas flowing from Russia to Germany.)

However, many within Germany believe that completely cutting off Russian gas supplies could cause energy prices to skyrocket, or would otherwise require further use of coal or nuclear energy, both of which were planned to be phased out in the near future.

On the western side of Ukraine, Russian tanks and rockets have not yet disturbed the city of Stryi in Lviv Oblast. But the impact of the war is being felt here too, and other challenges take precedence over the fight for climate action.

“In the past weeks rents have doubled,” said Anastasiia Onufriv, another Fridays for Future Ukraine activist, referring to a natural consequence of an influx of refugees arriving in her city.

For now, Onufriv is grateful that her own landlord hasn’t increased her rent. She thinks the Ukrainian government has done a good job on holding down prices on basic commodities. Still, it’s a worrying omen, especially considering her loss of income due to the war. Onufriv’s most recent primary job was teaching English online, mostly to young Ukrainians in Kyiv. That job is now gone.

“It’s impossible to talk about the climate crisis right now,” Onufriv said, “but the war is only escalating the crisis, and speeding up the time until doomsday.”

Echoing El Kortbi’s sentiments, she explained why she believes Putin is attacking her country.

“Many other wars, probably all modern wars, are because of fossil fuel capitalism,” Onufriv said. “It appears that for Putin, it’s not enough to have all the oil and gas that they have in Russia. Or it’s cheaper and easier to have control of more resources from other countries.”

Seeing the massive amount of media coverage and social media attention that Ukraine is getting, El Kortbi, Onufriv, and their Fridays for Future colleagues believe now is a critical time to bring attention to the ways in which oil extraction fuels global conflicts. To that end, they have reached out to Fridays for Future organizers around the world requesting that rallies be organized in solidarity with Ukraine — to denounce Putin’s tyranny, to call for peace, and to call for the end of fossil fuel wars in other parts of the world as well.

“First of all, I want the war in Ukraine to stop, but this is only the starting point,” Onufriv said. “I hope the world wakes up to the wars happening everywhere.”

The Ukrainian activists’ call for global protests in solidarity did not go unheard. Fridays for Future Ukraine tweeted a list of over 100 cities where demonstrations were organized. The majority of demonstrations were held in Europe, but there were also a handful in North America, and several in cities and towns across Africa, Asia, and South America.

In Berlin, an estimated 5,000 participants — including schoolchildren who had been allowed to miss some hours of school for the event — marched from the Ukrainian embassy to the capitol building on Thursday.

“We are here in solidarity with the people of Ukraine,” said Clara Duvigneau of Fridays for Future Berlin. Asked how this strike differed from a larger protest for peace in Ukraine that took place in Berlin last Sunday (February 27), she said that the focus of this march was also on the connection between peace and climate justice, “Because climate justice only works in peace.”

Climate activists in Ukraine and around the world know that it will take much more than global protests to influence Putin’s course of action. But the widespread support in the form of both demonstrations and online activism offers hope to people in Ukraine.

“It helps a lot to see the support from all over the world,” Onufriv said. “It gives us power to keep on fighting.”