In the last meeting of the G-7 in Hiroshima, the image of Zelenski as the center of attention of the leaders of the main world powers captured the historic appointment. However, another more modest conference went unnoticed. The Minister of Agrarian Policy, Mykola Solski, asked his counterparts for financial help to demine the Ukrainian fields after exposing that there are 470,000 hectares of crops riddled with explosive devices that have killed dozens of farmers. The 26,000 deactivators who work for Kiev, many of them professionals from private agencies, have managed to clean up 57,000 hectares in a slow process due to the risk and complexity of their work, but also due to the lack of specialized machinery, Solski clarified. Even so, 350,000 mines have been disarmed.
The West has supplied Ukraine with a vast arsenal. From rifles to missiles, armored vehicles, battle tanks and even land mines; traps that his army has left along the way to fortify his lines and block the advance of the Russians and that now he must also eliminate if he wants to retrace his steps in a possible counteroffensive. Of all this material, the least the allies have sent are ‘cleaning’ machines to neutralize the death camps, despite the fact that Kiev has assembled a decent fleet of Leopard 2Rs – supplied by Finland and attaching a large armored portcullis to a battle tank–, the Armtrac 400 robot or the M58MICLIC, a US patented remote system that detonates an explosive cord to activate buried bombs and open a corridor for military convoys.
kyiv’s ‘meteorite’
Washington has refused, however, to send its crown jewel: the M1150 Assault Breacher Vehicle (ABV) that it debuted in 2010 against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Based on the bodywork of the Abrahams tanks, it was the efforts of the Marines that brought this project to completion, which the White House did not welcome due to previous failures with other experiments. The United States has kept several of these vehicles on the Korean peninsula since 2013 in anticipation of the need to clear the famous DMZ, the 250-kilometer-long demilitarized zone that separates Pyongyang and Seoul, where millions of mines would have been buried.
So Ukraine must use above all the UR-77 Meteorit that it kept in the garage, an effective, versatile armored deactivator inherited from the USSR. Known as the ‘red dragon’, the Soviet army began using it in 1978. Syrian troops have used it for the past decade to bring down armed groups sheltering in buildings and fortifications after proving its deadly effectiveness in urban warfare on the outskirts of Damascus.
The urgency to intensify demining that Solski expressed at the G-7 conference does not only affect cereal fields. The existence of such a large and unknown number of artifacts buried along the thousand kilometers of the Russian front is one of the main obstacles to a counter-coup from Ukraine. And it is an obstacle, a priori, overwhelming if the attack diagram that Kiev is considering – or at least, this is how it wants to be reflected in Western analyzes – turns out to be similar to what anyone has been able to see in a classic war movie: advancing like a dagger and pierce the Russian encirclement where it is weakest.
seven models to kill
It is true that the long battle of Bakhmut has decimated the invading forces, worn out their arsenal and prevented Moscow from striking other Donbas enclaves. But it has also given the Russians time to fortify their line of contact in a way that impresses many international observers. They have dug thousands of kilometers of winding trenches, built embrasures, placed thousands of concrete ‘tusks’ to slow down tanks, and strewn the ground with explosives.
Aerial espionage has allowed kyiv to observe the laborious defensive design put into practice by its enemy. Parallel to the front, the Russian army has built a strip made up of three barriers interspersed with anti-tank and anti-personnel mines. Enough to inflict heavy casualties on their rivals, especially if they come under close fire from the invaders from the trenches. To reach this devilish trap, the Ukrainians must first clean the baits that they themselves have placed on the battlefield.
The profusion of gadgets placed underground have a high capacity to immobilize troops. The danger of a mine lies not only in its ability to maim or take the life of a certain number of soldiers, but also in the paralyzing effect it has on the rest of the battalion. As a rule, the explosion of one of them blocks the victim’s companions because they do not know which course to take in the middle of the minefield without putting their lives at risk.
The number of active devices on Ukrainian soil is unknown, but some 174,000 square kilometers of territory are mined. That is, about a third of the former Soviet republic. Most of them are concentrated in Donbas, which still contains underground mines placed at the beginning of the conflict in 2014. Since the first exchanges of fire in February 2022, there is evidence that a thousand civilians have died as a result of these traps in the course of the current invasion. However, their actual number is supposed to be much higher. After the Russian siege of Kiev in the first weeks of the war, dozens of residents of the capital lost their lives when they ran into them when they went for a walk through the wooded paths on the outskirts
Russia has disseminated up to seven different models of antipersonnel mines that humanitarian organizations consider prohibited due to their lethal effect on the civilian population. Among them, state-of-the-art devices predominate, such as the POMZ-2M and the POM-3, an ‘intelligent’ device equipped with a vibration sensor capable of detecting a person within fifty meters and exploding at head height. In addition, the Ukrainians have found hundreds of ‘butterfly’ mines, banned by the Geneva Convention. It owes its name to its winged form, which allows it to glide after being launched from the air by a cluster projectile. It barely measures a few centimeters, but it can leave anyone who steps on it without legs. In total, the Kremlin had some 26.5 million antipersonnel mines in its arsenals before the invasion.
#thousand #kilometers #mines #separate #Russians #Ukrainians