Serhii Shmyrov and Pavlo Mykyento move slowly, deliberately, working as a team. Both men wear full-torso body armour and face shields, along with thick jackets. Winter has arrived in northern Ukraine and the wind blows cold across the fields.
Mykyento swings the arm of the South Australian-made metal detector in a broad arc before him. As he moves forward, step by step, Shmyrov follows, marking the narrow corridor they have cleared of landmines and unexploded ordnance with red and white pegs.
Depending on the level of contamination the pair find, they can cover about 150 square metres a day. It’s dangerous, monotonous work.
Around us, a forest of red and white pegs mark out previously cleared areas. Scattered among these are several taller yellow pegs marking the locations of detected mines and unexploded ordnance, or UXO. A couple of hastily-dug Russian foxholes in which troops once hid gape nearby. And just beyond, a red and white sign with the distinctive skull and crossbones symbol and the words: STOP–MINES.
Walking beyond that line of pegs could be fatal.
I have joined a team from The HALO Trust, the largest de-mining NGO operating in Ukraine, in an area about 70 kilometres north and east of Kyiv, near the settlement of Bervytsia.
In the early days of Russia’s invasion, a Russian unit spent about three weeks in this small rural community. They dug trenches and foxholes, parked their vehicles under trees out of sight of Ukrainian spotter drones, laid mines, and set trip wires and booby traps in the tree lines around their perimeter.
There are just over 37,000 square metres of land to be cleared here. Five teams are working on this site, each consisting of a team leader and two operators. Two of the people on each team are trained paramedics. The area to be made safe includes fields and woodlands, roads and tracks, and several houses and dachas – summer homes.
As Olga Yahhimovich, the Task Group Commander, explains,
People live here […] They walk in the forest and pick mushrooms. Kids play. That’s what makes it a top priority site.
Nadia Falko, 77, is one of these people. “With my friends – grandmas like me,” she laughs, “we used to pick mushrooms along the paths by the forest. We are very thankful to the de-miners for making those paths safe again.”
I drove to this site in late November with Bruce Edwards, HALO’s Head of Partnerships in Ukraine. Three days earlier, Ukraine had suffered through the largest air attack of the war – a dozen cities were hit by drones and missiles, including Kyiv. That morning we’d learned that US President Biden would provide Ukraine with previously withheld anti-personnel mines.
Until ten months ago, Edwards was Australia’s ambassador to Ukraine. When the war started in 2022, he and his team were evacuated to Poland, and there he stayed for the remainder of his tenure. But when time came to return to Canberra, he decided to leave the foreign service.
It was, he says, a matter of unfinished business. “It was frustrating sitting in Warsaw, and I knew there was more I could be doing.”
“I didn’t realise that after being an ambassador to Ukraine, I would for ever more be an ambassador for Ukraine,” he says with a smile. His wife and kids are in Poland, and he travels back when he can to be with them. But the work here is keeping him busy.
According to the United Nations, Ukraine is now the world’s most heavily mined country.
“This could be a job for life, I fear,” Edwards tells me.
‘Smart-mines’, ‘toe-poppers’, trip-wire
Ukraine’s Ministry of Economy estimates 139,000 square kilometres, almost one-third of Ukraine’s territory, has potentially been exposed to contamination by land mines and ordnance.
And despite the efforts of HALO and other organisations like it, that area is growing inexorably. The 1,000-kilometre front line is the longest minefield in the world, and contains millions of devices specifically designed to kill and maim. In 2023, the World Bank estimated that demining Ukraine could cost as much as 37 billion euros.
Mines are largely a defensive weapon. After Ukraine’s spectacular advances in the autumn of 2022, retaking Kherson in the south and pushing the Russians back from Kharkiv in the east, the Russians dug in and started laying mines in earnest.
Some, like the PMN-2, are simple blast mines, exploding on contact and designed to kill or maim.
Small PFM-1 butterfly mines, sometimes called toe-poppers, can be fired from rockets and scattered over large areas. They look like toys, and are attractive to small children. Containing just 37 grams of liquid high-explosive, they are designed to maim.
OZM-72 bounding fragmentation mines are activated by trip wire and will literally jump up out of the ground when triggered, exploding at chest height.
So-called “smart mines”, like Russia’s POM-3, contain sensors that detonate the weapon when it detects human movement nearby.
So heinous and indiscriminate are these weapons, and so horrific the injuries they cause, that the world got together in Ottawa in 1999 to ban them. A treaty was signed by 164 countries, including Ukraine. The United States and Russia did not sign it.
Ukraine’s Ambassador to Australia, Vasyl Myroshnychenko, told me that with their current equipment it would take about 750 years to clear all the mines laid so far. Yet the Ukrainian government has officially (if optimistically) set a target of clearing at least 80% of these mines in the next decade.
This is despite the fact that many of the most heavily mined areas cannot be touched while fighting continues.
Dangerous work
Eifion Foster, the Unit Commander for HALO’s operations in Central Ukraine, is a young Welshman who has worked for HALO for two years. “I did my training in Cambodia,” he tells me. “Then I worked in Sri Lanka and in Afghanistan.” He’s been in Ukraine since February 2024 and says the scale here is like nothing previously experienced.
In Cambodia extensive anti-personnel minefields were sown in the 1970s, mostly made up of smaller devices. Since 1979, there have been over 63,000 mine-related deaths and injuries, many of them children. There are an estimated 26,000 mine amputees in the country. Organisations like HALO are still at work there, trying to make the country safe.
The first stage of any mine clearance operation is always what is called a “non-technical survey”. Maps, drone and satellite imagery, official reports, and information from the army and police are used to determine what happened and where. The testimony and observations of local people are particularly valuable. “They know the area best,” says Yahhimovich. “They saw what happened here.”
Seventy-year-old Petro Shatayev, chairman of the local garden society, witnessed the Russian occupation of Bervytsia. “I am Russian myself,” he says. “And I am ashamed of what Russia has done to our village […] Now I must keep my dog on a lead when we walk, so he doesn’t set off a tripwire or a mine. The de-miners work on our land every day. I really appreciate that there are such people who help us to get rid of the danger.”
De-mining is dangerous work. According to the Ukrainian National Mine Action Centre, there have been 29 accidents during de-mining operations since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, which have resulted in the deaths of 18 people, and injured a further 44.
The HALO teams are well trained and professional. Their safety record is excellent, and the use of technologies such as drones and Robocut, a remote-controlled surface clearance vehicle, has helped to make the job safer.
Foster and the team, however, are reluctant to talk about the personal risks involved. They have chosen to do this work for a variety of reasons. For Foster, it is a chance to do something good for the world, and to travel.
Despite this, the team are acutely aware of the dangers. “Russian mining is far more sophisticated than anything we’ve seen in Cambodia or Afghanistan,” he says. For instance, the Russians will stack mines so that when one is removed, the one beneath explodes.
Serhii Shmyrov, a quiet and focused man, is from Bakhmut, a city that was almost completely destroyed when it fell to the Russians one year ago. Before the war he worked in a petrol station.
He demonstrates the Robocut, which is designed to move through dense brush, cutting away vegetation and triggering any trip-wires as it goes.
It looks like a small, armoured bulldozer. With the feed from the machine’s on-board camera coming through his goggles, he stands behind a protective shield directing the robot from his console, lowering its cutting head to the ground and gunning the throttle. The blades whir and rip through the underbrush. Any trip wires will be instantly triggered.
These machines, which cost over $US70,000 each, can clear several thousand square metres a day, doing a job too dangerous for people. They are literally life savers. But machines cannot do the job on their own. Once they have cleared the surface of potential tripwires, the teams must go in with metal detectors and look for anything that might be buried.
Once a mine or piece of UXO is identified, the HALO team calls in a government ordnance disposal team. Mines and UXO are either blown up in-situ, or can be removed, collected, and blown up en-masse, depending on the circumstances.
So far, the HALO team has identified and removed 66 pieces of live ordnance from this area along with countless pieces of inert metal: the rusted fragments of shattered weapons, rocket propelled grenade and mortar rounds, shell casings of various calibres, and used gas canisters.
Today, nothing explodes. Other than inert metal, no new mines or UXO are found.
A crater
On 14 March 2022, in the second week of the Russians’ illegal occupation of this small hamlet, Ukrainian artillery scored a direct hit on the unit’s ammunition truck. The resulting explosion kicked out ordnance in a radius of at least 50 metres.
The surrounding fields and thickets were littered with dozens of RPGs, 82 millimetre mortar rounds, small arms ammunition, 30 millimetre auto-cannon shells, grenades, cluster and fragmentation mines, a small arsenal of live and very dangerous explosives.
Foster leads us to the place where the ammo truck was when it was hit. We stand at the epicentre of the explosion. Even after two years, the ground beneath our feet is scorched. Trees and vegetation lean away, blown back by the force of the detonations. Chunks of twisted, rusting metal hulk in the dense brush, the remains of the truck.
I approach the line of pegs for a closer look. Shmyrov, hovering close by, puts out a hand, points down. The ground is littered with rusting munitions. “Careful,” he says in Ukrainian.
We follow a sandy track, staying within the red and white pegs. The sun comes out, providing some warmth. There are a few smiles from the team. Other than the eerie presence of danger just beyond the markers, it is a pleasant walk.
We come to a small summer home. When the Russians invaded, the owners – a husband and wife and their 12-year-old daughter – had fled Kyiv and come here, thinking they would be safe. The Russians arrived a few days later. Yahhimovich points to a crater about 15 metres from the house.
An 82 millimetre mortar round landed there. The shrapnel wounded the daughter. The Russians wouldn’t let them leave and go to the hospital. At first, they helped her, but after the ammunition truck was hit, they became angry. Thank God, she was okay.
We continue along the cleared path. HALO started work here in September 2024. In two months they have cleared 20,000 square metres of surface threats (booby traps and trip-wires), and 6,000 square metres of that area has also been cleared of sub-surface contamination. That’s what they call it – contamination – a word more evocative of an environmental project than a military one.
“Military de-mining is a completely different thing,” Foster tells me as we walk together. “In the army, it’s just about clearing a corridor so you can pass. It doesn’t even have to be perfect. A degree of losses are acceptable. It’s all about speed. You don’t want to get bogged down and become a target. This is humanitarian work. It has to be completely safe. Ninety-nine per cent isn’t good enough.”
From an environmental perspective, there are, ironically, two sides to the problem of land mines.
“Mines are pollution,” Bogdhan Kuchenko of the Ukrainian environmental charity Ecoaction told me when I met him in Kyiv. “Mines and UXO render the land useless for agriculture or any other productive use. Animals are also killed by mines.”
But there is a potential benefit. “Mined areas may be off-limits for many years. During that time, ecosystems can recover.”
In places like Cyprus, the mined demilitarised zone between Turkish and Cypriot forces runs from one end of the country to the other. Forty years after the ceasefire, the corridor is a thriving ecosystem home to mature trees, flourishing undergrowth, and dozens of species of native birds and animals.
But here in Ukraine, that time is far away. Right now, the Ukrainians are doing what they can, just holding on, and trying to save lives, as the Russians sow even more mines.
Paul Hardisty does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
