Decades will undoubtedly be necessary to neutralize the thousands of still active explosive devices that have been dumped on nearly half of the territory of Ukraine, warn specialists two months after the start of the Russian invasion.
“It will take 50 years to demine everything,” said Perrine Benoist, director of armed violence reduction for the NGO Handicap International, recalling that “we are still demining in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, 50 to 60 years later. “.
“The killings and maimings will continue long after the war is over,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch. “It will be a matter of years, if not decades, to clean this all up.”
More than 300,000 km² in Ukraine, nearly half of the country’s territory, are contaminated with explosive devices, says Oleh Bondar, head of the demining services of Ukrainian Civil Security. This concerns “almost half of the territory of Ukraine, including the territory of the Donetsk region, the Luhansk region and the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, as well as the waters of the Black Sea and the Sea of ‘Azov,’ says Mr. Bondar.
He specifies that his demining service has removed since the beginning of the war more than 72,000 munitions, including more than 2,000 bombs of different calibers, on a total of 130 km². Efforts are currently focused on the Kyiv region.
Before the war, launched by Russia on February 24, only 8% of Ukrainian territory was considered contaminated, according to the Observatory of Mines and Cluster Munitions.
“The country is facing historical contamination,” notes Perrine Benoist.
The art of demining
In recent weeks, AFP journalists have seen countless unexploded ordnance on the streets of towns and villages northeast and northwest of kyiv, abandoned or misplaced during the Russian withdrawal.
Ukrainian demining is not a high-tech process: it relies on rudimentary tools and nerves of steel. It is done with a mine detector or with a long pointed pole. The mine is then gradually dug up with a shovel, yanked out of the ground with a grappling hook, then the detonator is removed and the device added to Ukraine’s arsenal.
smart mines
According to Perrine Benoist, explosive devices mainly target urban areas. They are therefore close to high densities of civilians, who will be the victims for years to come.
“We have complex fractures, amputations or even inhalation burns due to the toxicity of the fumes emitted by the explosions”, and humanitarian access is made more complicated because of all this contamination, she adds. .
Russian POM-3 antipersonnel mines, also known as “Medallion”, are used in this conflict, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). Spotted for the first time on March 28 by Ukrainian deminers, these mines “can indiscriminately kill and maim anyone present within a radius of approximately 16 meters”, explains the NGO in a report.
For HRW’s Steve Goose, mines and other explosive devices are “a huge socio-economic burden, as they can prevent people from returning to their homes, returning to their fields for harvesting, etc.”
The Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, signed in 1997, prohibits the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of these weapons. Unlike Ukraine, Russia is not one of the 164 signatory countries.
“What is most worrying is to see countries like the United States thinking that these weapons could be useful in neutralizing Russian troop movements,” worries Perrine Benoist.