A race against time has begun in Ukraine in the areas liberated by the army. The whole area between Izium and Kharkiv is strewn with mines and unexploded shells. But the seeds will not wait. Farmers have taken the problem into their own hands.
Beneath Oleksander’s shed lies an old tractor clad in sheet metal and wood on the sides, and fitted at the front with a huge patched shield. This unidentified motorized object is made up of pieces of charred Russian army tanks. It has been converted into a remote-controlled minesweeper. But he jumped the day before on an anti-tank mine, explains Oleksander: “The roller at the front jumped! And two windows of the cabin are broken. The main thing is that there are no injuries”.
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It was necessary to find a makeshift solution, after having discovered 260 mines in its fields. With his machine, Oleksander has already unearthed 30 of them. He places flags to mark the explosive devices then sows all around. “We called the state deminers, but they are overwhelmed. Their priority is power lines, gas pipelines… We quickly saw that we had to find a solution ourselves.”
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30 kilometers away, a huge farm of 16,000 hectares has more than half of its land inaccessible. The old front line had settled on these fields which are riddled with craters, mines, charred carcasses of tanks. Sacha’s men therefore focus on the less dangerous hectares for weeding. They passed the tractor for the first time, fear in their stomachs. On these lands, less exposed to combat, demining is done by eye, observing if there are traces of tanks. Sacha, an agricultural engineer, released three unexploded Grad rockets by hand. “They were in the middle of the field, he explains. We picked them up carefully and put them there. If the tractor had run over it, our worker would have died.”
The workers who pass first in a field also receive a bonus. “Before, we worked day and night in this sowing season, now, with the risk of mines in the fields, the driver must see what is in front of the tractor. And since he cannot spot explosive devices at night, he can only work for a short period of the day”continues Sasha.
“We’ve already survived so much that it doesn’t scare us.”
Sacha, agricultural engineerat franceinfo
Time is running out, confirms Sacha, the future of the company and its 50 employees is at stake.”If we don’t sow the sunflower, if we don’t treat it, we won’t have a harvest. If we don’t have a harvest, we won’t have any income, summarizes the operator. You have to pay taxes, wages, make profits to be able to develop the business. If we don’t have the opportunity to do all that, we will sink.” Sacha has made his calculations, the operation last year lost six million dollars for lack of being able to harvest, not to mention the price of agricultural machinery stolen by Russian soldiers.
So farmers don’t have time to wait, the harvest depends on it. So they take all the risks. Demining the country could take 30 years, according to Ukraine’s defense minister. The World Bank has estimated the cost of the operation at $37 billion.