How Ukraine was booby-trapped Even corpses can be weapons

In early July, Iryna decided to forage for mushrooms in the woodland near her home. This being eastern Ukraine, it very nearly killed her. There, amid the aspen and the hornbeam, she accidentally grabbed an unexploded bomb, which promptly blew up in her hands. Bleeding heavily from her arms and torso, but just about still conscious, Iryna called her son, who in turn informed the local police.

In the end, Iryna, who spoke to UnHerd using a pseudonym, survived her ordeal. Yet the 53-year-old’s experience is far from unique. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, some 4,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed by unexploded ordnance. Like Iryna, 1,000 more have been wounded, hardly surprising when so many threats lurk amid the undergrowth. After nearly three years of war, the UN estimates that almost 140,000 square kilometres of Ukraine have been contaminated, roughly 20% of its territory.

From shells and hand grenades, much of this haul appeared more or less accidentally, fired and forgotten until the next Iryna appears. Yet from landmines to booby traps, many weapons were placed deliberately, by Russian troops eager to murder, maim or otherwise demoralise their Ukrainian foes. Taken together, it means tracts of Ukraine will stay dangerous long after the fighting finally ends — perhaps for tens or even hundreds of years. All the while, the machinery of death is becoming more vicious, with vast consequences far beyond the Donbas.

Traditional landmines are fairly straight-forward. Consisting of a simple explosive, triggered to explode after being stepped on, many are tailor-made to damage flesh. Weighing up to nine kilos, with dimensions ranging from the size of a hockey puck to a shoebox, Russia alone has laid perhaps two million anti-personnel mines on Ukrainian territory since 2022.

Land mines are victim-operated. To quote Paul Heslop, an expert at the UN, the device just “sits there” until it’s activated. What happens next is often grim: firing lethal fragments up to 25 metres, they’re more than able to amputate limbs. Some models are even more cynical. During their doomed campaign in Afghanistan, for instance, Soviet forces used small butterfly-shaped explosives, which still today maim the children who naively pick them up. In recent times, similar devices have also been found in Ukraine.

Beyond anti-personnel mines, there are bigger pressure-plate mines, designed to target military vehicles. These contain far more explosives than their man-maiming cousins, sometimes as much as 10 kilos, and can easily disable a tank.

Civilian vehicles clearly stand little chance here, as Liudmyla Mykhailivna learnt to her cost. A farmworker from Kherson, the 53-year-old’s hometown was captured by Russia in March 2022. But after several months of gruelling occupation — Mykhailivna was often so frightened, she couldn’t even leave her home — enemy troops began to withdraw that November.

Taking her chance, Mykhailivna fled by car, alongside her four children. She wouldn’t get far: hitting a landmine on the road outside town, two of her children were killed on the spot. “I lost consciousness, and my youngest daughter was severely injured,” Mykhailivna tells me. “My 14-year-old son, Mykhailo, sustained a concussion, but he dragged us out of the vehicle.” The traumatised survivors only reached safety after a seven-kilometre trek to the next village.

At the same time, traditional landmines are shadowed by more ad hoc dangers. As Ukrainian troops gradually liberated territory occupied in 2022, the retreating Russians started leaving booby traps in their wake. “They put grenades under a sofa or in a fridge,” Heslop says, “or might rig up the electric circuit so when somebody fires the switch, a grenade or a mine goes off.”

Like with regular mines, the results can be brutal, especially when some reports suggest that the Russians have sometimes hidden bombs in toys, or even in the corpses of comrades killed in action. And if that means clearing booby-trapped areas can be remarkably complex, that still leaves the swathes of Ukraine inadvertently defiled by the detritus of war, from tank shells and mortars to the scattered remains of unexploded cluster bombs.

As Heslop explains, the scale here is truly biblical. Imagine, he says, that 1,000 shells are fired each day for 1,000 days. That’s a million shells, and while most will obviously detonate on impact, perhaps 40% malfunction, leaving a deadly harvest for innocents like Iryna.

With the war entering its fourth year, meanwhile, landmines are increasingly being replaced by drones. In July alone, Russia targeted Ukraine with over 6,000 drones, a 1,378% jump on the same period last year. On a single night in July, it launched a barrage of around 700 drones and missiles. Beyond their payloads, these drones are themselves unsafe. Whether they run out of fuel before they reach their targets, or else fail to detonate on impact, woe betide the first Iryna to come across them.

Unexploded munitions are increasingly causing second-order problems too: starting with the food chain. According to a recent UN assessment, Ukrainian agriculture has suffered over $80 billion worth of losses as a direct result of mine contamination, with the country’s wheat fields too dangerous to plough.

Given that this black-soiled land has long been known as Europe’s breadbasket — in 2021, Ukraine was the world’s seventh largest wheat producer and exported over $27 billion of agricultural produce — what happens here echoes far beyond its borders. “The decrease in the amount of agricultural land in Ukraine in 2022 pushed global food and energy prices up,” Hesop warns, adding that consumers are being affected from New York to Kabul.

Considering what’s at stake, what will it take to clear Ukraine of mines and other explosives? According to Globsec, a European security think tank, with current resources it could take an eye-watering 747 years. Heslop is more optimistic, but even his 50-year estimate feels sluggish, not least when Russia targets de-miners. Earlier this month, a strike near the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv killed two such workers, members of a Danish-sponsored humanitarian mission.

Then there’s the question of costs. According to the World Bank, de-mining a single metre of Ukrainian soil costs between $2 and $8. Taken together, making the whole country safe could come in at $37 billion over the next decade — and that’s if the war miraculously ended tomorrow.

And if Heslop insists the expense would be worth it — “spending $100 million in Ukraine saves $1 billion in food prices” — there are some signs that other parts of Europe may yet suffer a similar blight.

Over the last few months, several European states, including Poland, Estonia and Finland, have withdrawn from the Ottawa Treaty, the UN’s anti-personnel mine convention. Though these countries have yet to mine their borders, Warsaw lately announced that it had resumed production of anti-personnel devices, while Helsinki and Tallinn both plan to follow suit.

That reflects a broader understanding that, as nasty as they can be to civilians, such devices are militarily valuable. In 2024, for instance, Poland announced a defence initiative called “Tarcza Wschod”. Translated as Eastern Shield, it’s aimed at protecting the country’s borders from Russian forces — whether in the form of hybrid warfare or more traditional infantry assaults. Either way, mines are obviously key to this strategy, with one minister stating Poland may eventually need up to a million mines.

That’s mirrored by even more pernicious forms of mine technology. Consider, for example, the latest generation of drones — which can disperse explosives even further into civilian territory. One example is Russia’s Medalyon POM-3 system, an AI-powered landmine that can not only be activated remotely, but can also shoot metal fragments in a 360-degree arc.

Defence firms are equally busy developing the drones of tomorrow. One ominous development here is the so-called “mothership” drone, which can, in turn, deploy dozens of smaller bombs. With even nine-kilo machines capable of carrying explosives, many more forests could soon be infected with the artefacts of death. That’s bad news for mushroom pickers, and for the rest of us.

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