(Izium) Concealed, small and deadly mines and other explosive devices left by Russian forces in eastern Ukraine in districts from which they have withdrawn pose an urgent challenge to deminers ahead of the arrival of the ‘winter.
Posted at 12:35 a.m.
“Without us, there’s no chance of repairing services like electricity before winter,” said Artem, 33, who leads a team of deminers working around the town of Izium, recently liberated by Ukrainian forces.
“We discovered more than thirty mines and artillery shells today, mainly shells,” adds Artem, whose ten-person team is responsible for clearing areas around essential infrastructure such as electricity cables or pipes. water and gas.
“Each day we start where we left off yesterday,” he adds, watching electricians tread carefully behind a deminer through a field of sunflowers toward a severed cable.
Other deminers stack the discovered mines, whose detonators have been safely removed, behind a truck which will remove them for destruction.
Deminers explore the edges of a road strewn with debris between Izium, which Ukrainian forces seized in early September after six months of occupation by the Russian army, and the border of the Donetsk region, not far on this road .
Artem, who does not wish to communicate his last name, does not seem to be moved by the dangerousness of the work of his team, which inspects the edges of the road and progresses carefully in fields of tall grass.
“It’s our job, it’s what we know how to do, but now more than ever, it’s our duty”, he underlines.
Danger for children
“We have 35 men, divided into seven teams, coming from different regions of Ukraine,” says Vassyl Maidyk, 42, who commands the team of deminers deployed in the district of Izium.
“Nobody knows how long” the demining operations will take, he told AFP at the base of the Izioum deminers.
“Despite the help of international organizations, we have not even finished discovering the mines abandoned since the beginning of the first phase of the conflict in 2014”, he adds, referring to the clashes with the separatists of the eastern Ukraine.
But if the deminers “work quickly”, the district of Izioum can be cleared by November, which would allow essential services to be operational again by winter, he hopes.
Since the liberation of Izium, his teams have covered some 100 hectares in the district, he said, and discovered more than 5,000 mines around positions previously occupied by the Russians.
The deminers discovered both anti-tank mines, anti-personnel mines and artillery shells, as well as PFM-1 mines, known as “butterfly” mines, which are particularly destructive and prohibited by an international treaty to which Russia is not a party.
These small green mines with wings, known in Ukraine as “petals”, are all the more dangerous as they can be picked up by children, underlines Mr. Maidyk.
On the road, where only military vehicles are driving towards the front, Sacha’s team hammers poles on the edges of the road, hanging signs with a skull and crossed bones indicating “Danger – Mines! »
“It’s no more dangerous than crossing the road in normal times,” says Sacha, 44, cigarette in mouth, commenting on the situation with a shrug.
“Now the next mine is two meters away, he said, so here we are more or less safe,” he said.