Oleksandr Kryvtsov had enough.
The owner of an agricultural company in Hrakove, near Kharkiv, Kryvtsov found his land littered with land mines. That region of Ukraine, occupied by Russian forces for nearly eight months, had been pockmarked with explosive ordinances. The threat meant that farmers like Kryvtsov had to let their fields lay fallow. Even though Kryvstov’s fields were once part of Europe’s breadbasket, Ukraine’s mine clearance teams were overworked and under-resourced.
So Kryvtsov came up with his own solution. He jimmyrigged a plow onto an old tractor, with massive steel rollers underneath. On the side, he painted the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag. Kryvtsov connected a remote-control steering system and, from afar, he drove his Mad Max-style tractor over his fields, detonating any mines lurking under the soil.
The makeshift operation has worked well, Kryvtsov told Reuters, even clearing an anti-tank mine.
Kryvstov’s story is an example of incredible Ukrainian ingenuity—a nation of gilders, working to invent, adapt, and repurpose technology to defend themselves against a better-resourced, larger, determined enemy. But it’s also an ominous sign of just how bad the problem is.
In recent months, WIRED has investigated the technological challenges and opportunities facing Ukraine as it tries to defend itself and recapture its territory. One particular problem, unsung by the Western media but frequently cited by Ukrainian officials, are the haphazard minefields across Eastern Ukraine.
WIRED has spoken to a range of engineers, government officials, and humanitarian mine-clearance experts, and consulted Ukraine’s new mine clearance plan. It is apparent that Kyiv is prioritizing the problem, but without a significant new influx of money, personnel, and technology, the threat of these mines could hobble Ukraine’s economy, frustrate future counteroffensives, and pose a humanitarian crisis for decades to come.
Ukraine’s mine issue has been critical for a decade. The full-blown war with Russia has escalated the situation. From 2014, the year Russia launched its invasion, to the close of 2021, as reported by the United Nations, land mines killed 312 Ukrainians. Following Russia’s invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has reported a minimum of 269 civilian casualties, which includes 14 children. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal has begun referring to Eastern Ukraine as “the largest minefield in the world.”
The reported casualty figures include only the deaths on the territories currently under Ukrainian control. Behind the front lines, in the Russian-held regions of Eastern Ukraine, reports have it that at least hundred additional deaths have occurred.
“Twenty percent of the entire region is hazardous,” states Ihor Bezkaravainyi, the Ukraine’s deputy minister of finance, in his conversation with WIRED. “Currently we are discussing about 150,000 square kilometers.” (This total area, inclusive of the waters teeming with naval mines, is almost 175,000 km².)
Bezkaravainyi, an experienced veteran of the Eastern Ukraine war, lost a leg to an anti-tank mine in 2016. Presently, he is accountable for coordinating the efforts to clear the mines behind the front lines. His responsibilities also include restoring Ukrainians to their properties and recovering the agricultural lands that were damaged. This is not an easy task.
“It looks like the zone rogue in France after World War One,” Bezkaravainyi says, referring to the areas near Germany and Belgium that remain contaminated by land mines to this day.
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Conducting surveys to identify those mines will be a gargantuan challenge. Actually clearing them will be even more taxing.
Russia has deployed older anti-tank and anti-personnel mines—of the kind the world has ample experience dealing with. But it is believed that this is the first time the sophisticated PTKM-1R anti-tank mine, which detonates only when it picks up a certain seismic signature, has been used in battle. Russia has also made liberal use of the more advanced PFM-1 mine, also known as the “butterfly mine,” made mostly from plastic and liquid explosive. These mines are particularly odious because they can be scattered in huge quantities from afar or from the air, meaning that they are impossible to track. Because they are colorful and plastic, they can be mistaken by children as toys.
Beyond purpose-built mines, Russia has also littered Ukraine with unexploded munitions and “improvised explosive devices and booby traps,” according to a draft version of Kyiv’s plan to decontaminate the country, prepared late last year and provided to WIRED.
Until now, Ukraine has not had a national plan on how to deal with the mine problem—its ad hoc response has been split between the military, NGOs, a small number of private mine-clearance companies, and a small network of government mine-clearance operators.
In 2021, before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine had certified just four “mine action operators” to conduct the mine identification and clearance. Since the start of the war, that number has grown to “only 23.” That number is simply “not adequate,” the plan states.
This National Mine Action Strategy was devised to bring consistency and focus to this effort. But it warns that the scope of this problem “cannot be solved in a short-term perspective.” Kyiv hopes it can assess the entirety of its lands, to identify which areas are actually contaminated and which are safe to use, by 2029. By 2033, Ukraine aspires to have decontaminated 80 percent of its previously occupied territory. The strategy does not provide a date for when the whole country might be free of mines.
If Ukraine wants to meet these goals, it will need significantly more staff, technology, and equipment than it has now.
Humanitarian demining groups are stretched across global conflict zones making this a challenging endeavor. Commercial operators, on the other hand, can be quite costly.
This harsh reality led Kryvtsov, a farmer, to attempt mine-clearance operations on his own. Yet, Kyiv warns of the risks and unreliability of these “black sappers”. Despite this, the government understands that the appeal of these operators will grow unless the pace of progress isn’t quickened.
Many aspects of Ukraine’s strategy for this issue are home-grown. This includes a substantial financial commitment to build the country’s capacity to create mine-clearing equipment, invest in demining technology, as well as training of demining teams. The World Bank, in early 2023, approximated the cost of finding and removing these mines to be nearly $38 billion. However, Kyiv anticipates the real figure will be significantly higher.
In the snow-laden fields close to the front lines, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are deploying autonomous demining vehicles. These vehicles, although specifically built for this purpose and donated by European allies, closely resemble Kryvstov’s homemade contraption.
Since the start of the war, these military demining teams have cleared more than 280,000 mines—at a pace of more than 2,200 every week. Its work is entirely separate from the humanitarian teams run under Bezkaravainyi’s department.
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The military may have cleared a staggering volume, but the work is impeded by a lack of equipment. The military boasts 262 separate demining teams, but it has just six demining vehicles.
In an essay for The Economist, former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Valerii Zaluzhnyi wrote that his forces were initially relying on “technically outdated pieces of equipment” to conduct this operational mine clearance. With Western donations, “it was possible to slightly augment the capabilities of engineer units … but given the unprecedented scale of these barriers, even such capabilities are objectively lacking.”
Much of the analysis of Ukraine’s failed summer counteroffensive has focused on the offensive gear it lacks—artillery shells, fighter jets, drones, and long-range missiles. But even if it had managed to pierce the Russian front line, Ukraine faced layers of other defensive structures, including between 15 and 20 kilometers of minefields.
As pointed out by Zaluzhnyi, reconnaissance drones from Russia have been monitoring these minefields and aiming at any Ukrainian clearance teams. He reveals that when successful breaches of mine barriers occur, enemy forces quickly restore minefields in those areas.
European allies, particularly, have been generous in donating vehicles for mine clearance, with vehicles like the retrofitted Leopard 2 tanks made in Germany. However, these vehicles have been majorly impacted by Russian forces.
Although clearing fields close to the front lines poses a high risk and is challenging, it is feasible for Russia to remotely and rapidly lay these fields. The ISDM Zemledeliye, a mobile mine-laying system that is truck-mounted, can accommodate up to 50 rockets. Each rocket is packed with anti-personnel or anti-tank mines designed to spread across a specific region. This system enables the user to lay minefields from distances up to 15 kilometers. A pro-Kremlin Russian media platform recently commented that the Zemledeliye, which translates to ‘agriculture’ in Russian, symbolically ‘sowed’ the defeat of the Ukrainian counteroffensive during summer.
“The Ukrainian forces may not necessarily have the kind of equipment or trained brigades to effectively pierce that defense and successfully combat the Russians who are defending their positions in a doctrinally consistent and essentially sound manner,” Karolina Hird, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War and the deputy team lead for their Russia desk, mentions to WIRED. “Which brings us to the current situation.”
Even if Kyiv manages to overcome all of those other problems, if it cannot figure out how to clear the Russian-laid minefields, its progress risks being squandered.
“One of the big operational problems is, how do you increase by an order of magnitude the detection of mines, mapping of minefields, and the clearance of them—whilst denying the Russians visibility of them?” Mick Ryan, a 35-year veteran of the Australian Army who has traveled to Ukraine frequently during the war, tells WIRED. “And these are pretty significant problems, but they’re known problems, right?”
Ryan says there needs to be a deeper recalibration of the relationship between Ukraine and NATO. At the beginning of the war, the transfer of knowledge and expertise from NATO to Ukraine may have been largely one-directional, but today, Ukraine’s expertise in modern warfare certainly rivals many of its benefactors.
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“Ukrainians and NATO, they just need to divide up the problems and solve them,” Ryan says. “I mean, this isn’t inventing the nuclear bomb.”
As the National Mine Action Strategy notes, research on mine clearance has been sorely lacking.
There has been, the strategy says, a “lack of systematic and centralized work on the introduction of innovative technologies in the field of Mine Action, in particular, unmanned aerial vehicles, the use of satellite images, artificial intelligence, data collection and analysis systems.”
It’s a frustration that Federica Mezzani knows well. Since 2019, she’s been researching how new technologies can help improve mine detection strategies—but it is a field, she says, which had been “completely forgotten.”
Despite the fact that an estimated 110 million mines are still active around the world, they are primarily distributed in poor and war-torn countries. While NGOs such as the HALO Trust have worked to steadily decontaminate those territories, the research and development has been piecemeal and slow. It simply hasn’t been a priority.
But Mezzani, along with her colleagues in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Sapienza University in Rome, set out to prove that new technology could help with this old problem. There had been some research testing how drones could be used to identify unexploded ordinances, but not much. Mezzani wanted to take it a step further, dispatching drone swarms equipped with ground-penetrating radar to methodically scan each section of the ground, the way a human team might. Algorithms could essentially automate mine detection, she believed.
In a series of small-scale experiments, Mezzani’s technique worked.
“The experimental campaign proved the effectiveness of the algorithm, which appears as a powerful tool to automatically detect buried objects with even small metal content,” reads her paper, published in Advances in Nonlinear Dynamics in 2022.
“The technology is ready,” Mezzani tells. “I think that it’s been ready for many years, actually.”
When the full-scale war began, research efforts like Mezzani’s were few and far between. This necessitated the creation of these strategies from scratch.
Part of the difficulty revolves around certainty. Bezkaravainyi explains that in humanitarian mine clearance, there is no tolerance for civilian casualties. If a zone is marked as safe, they must be completely certain it is completely safe. Where feasible, this also means disabling the land mines instead of detonating them and further polluting the soil.
This method is significantly less speedy compared to how the military clears territory. With the aim of speed, the military may explode a pathway through an active minefield to advance quickly without completely clearing it. To this end, humanitarian mine clearance operates on the Swiss cheese model: implementing multiple imperfect strategies simultaneously.
Bezkaravainyi describes that their typical procedure involves consulting high-resolution satellite imagery of the area and identifying land mines from above. Subsequently, drones may be sent to confirm these locations and detect mines that may be concealed or hard to notice. After that, teams are sent to inspect the area.
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Last fall, at an international conference on Ukraine’s demining efforts held in Zagreb, Bezkaravainyi’s department unveiled a prototype, developed by American surveillance technology giant Palantir, which used artificial intelligence to help inform how Kyiv approaches mine clearance.
This multilayered approach is increasingly necessary. Magnetometers and thermal scanners, which identify mines by identifying the metal amidst the organic material, were once the gold standard for mine identification. Some mines have electromagnetic shields, protecting them from ground-penetrating radar. The PFM-1 mine, in particular, contains very little metal, making it difficult to detect.
This problem is mostly, but not entirely, of Russia’s making. Reports suggest that Ukraine has also deployed these PFM-1 mines against Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine.
Difficult terrain, such as forests or mud, makes this work more difficult. Ukraine has difficult terrain in spades: It even has a word, bezdorizhzhya, for the mud that covers the eastern part of the country in the spring.
“If all the technologies in the world were given to Ukraine, it would not be enough,” Bezkaravainyi says.
Ukraine is not just contemplating how to purchase and collect enough technology to perform this task—they are outlining a strategy to become a global leader in mine clearance.
This kind of focus has been sorely missed for many years. “It’s a type of research that doesn’t yield profits,” Mezzani says. She encountered this issue herself during her own research project. “I wouldn’t say that we have a technological problem. We have a lack of willingness.”
There are still about 70 countries worldwide affected by land mines, as per the United Nations, causing harm to thousands every year. Most of these are located in the Global South. The Ukrainian conflict might just be the catalyst needed to develop the technology and expertise to tackle this issue.
Indeed, Bezkaravainyi says his department has fielded plenty of offers from companies professing expertise in mine clearance, but many have been unreliable, haven’t delivered, or were outright scams.
If Ukraine can develop both the technology and the industry to do this work, it could provide a critical advantage in the war, boost its battered economy, and provide an enormous service to the entire world.
Brave1, a platform launched by the Ukrainian government to identify innovative projects and connect them to public and private financing, has identified mine clearance as one of its main priorities. Thus far, 30 projects—which range from autonomous land vehicles to more sophisticated detection systems—are part of the Brave1 platform.
If the Ukrainian government can spur the creation of a domestic demining industry, it will speed up its economic recovery, help war-torn countries the world over, and maybe even help win the war.
