Fields and roadsides, sometimes even houses, are strewn with unexploded ordnance. The neutralization of these devices by the Ukrainian authorities has only just begun.
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The trucks slowly descend to the bottom of a sand quarry. Far from the houses, Ukrainian soldiers are unloading shells, mines, explosives which they carefully place in a large hole. “Every day my collaborators identify shells, ammunition or unexploded objectssays Mykola Muray, head of the pyrotechnic service of the police in the Kyiv region. All the ones you see there, we collected them in just one week.”
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In the kyiv region, residents are gradually discovering the damage, including the hundreds of unexploded ordnance left behind by Russian soldiers. Demining operations have begun and experts are crisscrossing the territory to recover, defuse, and sometimes explode these mines and shells which have claimed several victims in recent days.
Several dozen machines were transported to the sand quarry after calls from residents. “We had thirteen calls for accidentsexplains the Ukrainian official Mykola Muray. There are people whose car jumped while driving on the road, others on the verge, still others who took a box in their hands and it exploded.
“The Russians left us a lot of mines just to hit the civilians.”
Mykola Muray, head of the pyrotechnic service of the police in the Kyiv regionat franceinfo
This scourge is likely to last, warns Mykola Muray: “Practice shows that one year of war is equivalent to ten years of demining. The intense fighting lasted in this area for about a month. I can already tell you that it will take a year to clear all this.” In the meantime, all those explosives keep killing. Two days ago a man died, another injured west of kyiv in the forest.
War in Ukraine: report by Faustine Calmel and Jérémy Tuil with deminers near kyiv
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