Russian terror with landmines: Ukraine uses an armored roller tractor

Russia has hidden millions of mines and booby traps in Ukraine. In some areas almost all open spaces are affected. Western systems are no help, so Ukrainians are getting creative themselves. Among other things, armored tractors are used.

At the end of August, a Ukrainian farmer almost pays for his work with his life. In the south of the country he would like to cultivate a field near Nova Kamyanka. The village is located in the Kherson region on the western bank of the Dnipro, not far from the former Kakhovka reservoir, in the area that is one of the most fertile in Ukraine. But Russian terror does not stop at Ukrainian agriculture. As the farmer plows his field with his tractor, he drives over a mine that Russian troops left behind over the past year and a half.

The 62-year-old was injured in the face and hands and is being treated in hospital, reports “Kyiv Independent” citing the Kherson military administration. He is lucky in misfortune: just two days earlier, a farmer in Novopetriwka, 40 kilometers away, paid for his work in the fields with his life.

87 percent of the area is mined

It is difficult to grasp how many landmines Russia has hidden and left behind in Ukraine. Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said in March that Russian troops had mined around a third of the country’s territory since the start of the war. In the contested Kherson region in southern Ukraine alone, 87 percent of the open area is said to have been paved with anti-tank or anti-personnel mines.

The booby traps are intended to injure or kill Ukrainian troops or restrict their freedom of movement to the point that they are an easy target for Russian artillery on the other side of the Dnipro, but also threaten the lives of civilians. On hot summer days in August, using drones and thermal imaging cameras, Ukrainian units were able to reveal what they had to deal with during their counteroffensive: In some cases, there were more than 50 booby traps in an area the size of 40 football fields.

“We can’t wait”

“First pioneers should work in the fields, then you,” the Ukrainian authorities warn farmers in the liberated areas of Kherson. But the pioneers are needed at the front, where they clear Russian minefields by hand at night. Even with their help, it could take ten or 20 years to graze and secure the entire affected area using known methods and means.

Ukrainian farmers cannot wait that long. If they don’t till their fields, don’t sow grain and later harvest it, they don’t earn any money and go hungry. That’s why many of them become inventive or – like farmer Bohdan in the Black Sea region of Mykolaiv – simply ignore any risk: he single-handedly collected rockets, cluster munitions and mines from his fields and detonated everything that didn’t explode himself.

“We can’t wait” he says on Radio Liberty. “People need jobs and something to eat.”

Olexander Kryvtsow sees it the same way, but he doesn’t take quite as risky an approach south of Kharkiv. He exploited remnants of the Russian occupiers and reinforced a tractor with protective plates from destroyed tanks and other military vehicles. Using other parts, he built a huge excavator-like shovel that can be attached to the front. Since then, he has been driving his self-built mine clearer by remote control over his fields – successfully, as he told Reuters explained: When he hit a mine, the shovel broke, but the tractor was not damaged. After a short repair, Olexander was able to continue.

“Metal detector didn’t respond”

There are many approaches, says Tymofij Milovanov. In addition to tractors and fearless farmers, radar devices, thermal imaging cameras and acoustic systems are also being used throughout the country. But one of them is the former Ukrainian minister for economic development and current president of the Ukrainian economic powerhouse Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) is not convinced: Cameras help with discovering mines, not with clearing or defusing them, says the economist in the “Again was learned” podcast from ntv.de.

Another problem: Many systems can often only detect a certain type of mine, but Russia relies on this, according to Human Rights Watch at least 13 different types of booby traps a. Sometimes a load of five kilograms is enough to trigger the detonation. Other mines already react to steps one and a half meters away. Still others are as small as a finger and practically invisible.

“There are many challenges,” says Tymofij Milovanov. The economist cites plastic mines as a particularly difficult example. These are not only small, but sometimes only consist of five grams of metal. “I saw with my own eyes how a metal detector was right over it and didn’t react,” says the KSE president in the podcast.

According to him, professional western demining systems are not much help either. Although they do an excellent job, they are time-consuming to use and are therefore no help for what Russia has done: mining almost an entire part of the country.

Roll mines flat

The economist prefers simple but solid mechanical solutions for clearing. He looked at one of them a few weeks ago in a factory in Kharkiv and then featured on Twitter. It works in a similar way to farmer Olexander Kryvtsow’s converted tractor, but instead of a shovel, a large, eight-ton roller is tensioned in front of the remote-controlled vehicle. It is rolled across the field, triggers all the mines with its weight and absorbs the force of the detonations with its mass.

According to KSE President Milovanov, the advantage of the roller is that it can be mass-produced locally in Ukraine. If one is destroyed, it can easily be replaced, repaired or even melted down and recycled.

The economist says that this would make the laborious process of detecting mines unnecessary – provided that there are enough rollers that are a little more stable and no longer so expensive to produce. Mined areas could then be staked out and plowed by several roller tractors at the same time. It doesn’t matter whether it’s agricultural fields or other open spaces.

“The Russians have mined a lot of areas around energy infrastructure,” Milovanow says in the podcast. “If a power line needs to be repaired, you could use the rollers to move the ground around it and allow workers to make the repairs.”

Booby traps in corpses and dolls

But there are places where tractors with buckets and rollers are not suitable. When withdrawing from the occupied territories, there was no place too macabre for the Russian troops to injure or kill Ukrainians: In recent months, mines and self-made booby traps have been found in washing machines and lighters, in front gardens and backyards, in playgrounds, etc discovered in dolls and even dead Russian soldiers.

In such cases, Ukrainian or Western experts have only one choice. They have to move forward centimeter by centimeter, painstakingly identifying each individual death trap and rendering it harmless. A task that could take decades, at least: some places, such as the forest areas in the suburbs of Kiev, may never be accessible again, even though they were only briefly occupied by Russian troops. But even if mines were left behind there, they are now overgrown by trees, plants and bushes and may no longer be recognizable.

Tymofij Milovanov therefore expects a Ukraine with several levels of security in the future: There will be safe places and some that are reasonably safe, says the KSE President in the podcast. There you will be allowed to enter certain paths and paths, but not leave them. But there will also be areas that will be cordoned off and cordoned off until a viable solution can be found. Shovels, rollers and armored tractors are not enough.