Deminers remove deadly threats to Ukrainian civilians
HRAKOVE, UKRAINE >> Beside an abandoned Russian military camp in eastern Ukraine, the body of a man lay decomposing in the grass — a civilian who had fallen victim to a tripwire land mine set by retreating Russian forces.
Nearby, a group of Ukrainian deminers with the country’s territorial defense forces worked to clear the area of dozens of other deadly mines and unexploded ordnance — a push to restore a semblance of safety to the cities, towns and countryside in a region that spent months under Russian occupation.
The deminers, part of the 113th Kharkiv Defense Brigade of Ukraine’s territorial defense forces, walked deep into fallow agricultural lands on Thursday along a muddy road between fields of dead sunflowers overgrown with high weeds.
Two soldiers, each with a metal detector in hand, slowly advanced up the road, scanning the ground and waiting for the devices to give a signal. When one detector emitted a high tone, a soldier knelt to inspect the mud and grass, probing it with a metal rod to see what might be buried just below the surface.
The detector’s hit could indicate a spent shell casing, a piece of rusting iron or a discarded aluminum can. Or, it could be an active land mine.
Oleksii Dokuchaev, the commander of the demining brigade based in the eastern Kharkiv region, said that hundreds of mines have already been discharged in the area around the village of Hrakove where they were working, but that the danger of mines across Ukraine will persist for years to come.
“One year of war equals 10 years of demining,” Dokuchaev said. “Even now we are still finding munitions from World War II, and in this war they’re being planted left and right.”
Russian forces hastily fled the Kharkiv region in early September after a rapid counteroffensive by Ukraine’s military retook hundreds of square miles of territory following months of Russian occupation.
While many settlements in the region have finally achieved some measure of safety after fierce battles reduced many of them to rubble, Russian land mines remain an ever-present threat in both urban and rural environments.
Small red signs bearing a white skull and crossbones line many of the roads in the Kharkiv region, warning of the danger of mines just off the pavement. Yet sometimes, desperation drives local residents into the minefields.
The local man whose body lay near the abandoned Russian camp was likely searching for food left behind by the invading soldiers, Dokuchaev said, an additional danger posed by the hunger experienced by many in Ukraine’s devastated regions.
The use of the kind of tripwire land mines which killed him is prohibited under the 1997 Ottawa Treaty — of which Russia is not a signatory — which regulates the use of anti-personnel land mines, he said.