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The mines are to blame, a calamity that continues to torment the country. To try to combat this nightmare, 50 countries are currently meeting in Lausanne to discuss the problem.
17.10.2024, 11:5517.10.2024, 12:27
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kyiv’s soldiers can continue to fight. They can drive the Russians out of their territory, push them back to Moscow if they want. This will not change anything. Ukraine has already lost a lot in this war. Even if Zelensky triumphs on the battlefield, his country is now infested by one of the worst scourges on earth. Lives will be destroyed and the national economy will be paralyzed long after the combatants have laid down their arms.
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According to kyiv, a quarter of Ukrainian territory is currently covered in mines. Which officially makes it the most mined state in the world. The fault of the Russian invader, but not only that. Ukraine itself is said to have scattered thousands of antipersonnel mines around certain cities to defend them. An effective military strategy, but forbidden and disastrous.
By spreading their weapons of death, Moscow and kyiv are jeopardizing the future of the Ukrainian population. There are of course physical consequences. Twenty years after the end of the civil war which ravaged Angola and during which more than a million mines were buried, men, women and children continue to lose one limb or more while walking where you shouldn’t. The UN speaks of more than 80,000 Angolans mutilated or killed.
Here are some makeshift Angolan prostheses. I’ll let your imagination do the restSébastien Anex/Fabien Feissli
“Landmine injuries are particularly horrific, and war surgeons consider them among the most difficult to treat. Often, when a person steps on an antipersonnel mine buried in the ground, the explosion tears off their leg, or both, and throws up dirt, grass, gravel, shards of metal and plastic. from the mine casing, shoe pieces and bone fragments in the muscles and lower parts of the victim’s body. Typically, victims who survive landmine explosions require amputations, multiple operations and lengthy physical rehabilitation.”
The ICRC
The words are crude, but they have the merit of being clear. However, behind the physical suffering, we too often forget the economic consequences of the problem. All it takes is one mine, buried somewhere on land, to render it unusable. Who would risk their leg to build a building there or grow cereals? So many cultivable hectares which will inevitably be lacking in Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe before the war.
The kind of stuff you find in an Angolan minefieldImage: Sébastien Anex/Fabien Feissli
Because these tens (hundreds?) of thousands of mines will not disappear by magic once the conflict is over. Worse still, no one will remember where they were buried. It will be necessary to launch a gigantic treasure hunt to extract them one by one, like so many thorns in the side of a country trying to move forward.
Western officials are already talking about the future reconstruction of Ukraine. Faced with this encouraging optimism, many questions arise: who will finance the demining of Ukraine and, above all, who will scratch the ground?
To try to answer this, Switzerland is organizing the “Ukraine Mine Action Conference” in Lausanne, right now. Viola Amherd and Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Schmyhal opened the event which aims to “highlight the crucial importance of mine clearance as a central element of social and economic reconstruction».
The Confederation will take the opportunity to officially announce that it will provide mine-clearing robots to kyiv. Bern has also committed to paying 100 million per year until 2027 to support mine clearance in Ukraine. A nice gesture, but a drop in the ocean when we know that the UN has estimated the total decontamination of the territory at $34 billion. Suffice to say that the conflict is colossal.
I don’t want to depress Ukrainians, but two decades after the end of its civil war, Angola is still far from having cleaned up its territory.
And it’s not for lack of putting energy and inventiveness into it. To speed up the process, deminers used dogs, rats and even impressive remote-controlled tanks, an invention of the Swiss Digger Foundation ????.
But the simplest and most widely used technique is to get down on your knees and dig the ground inch by inch, risking your life with each mistake. To give you an idea, a deminer clears, on average, 30m2 per day. Ukraine is 600,000 km2: or 15 times Switzerland. They haven’t finished scraping yet.
Image: Sébastien Anex/Fabien Feissli
This article was originally published in February 2023. It was updated and adapted on the occasion of the “Ukraine Mine Action Conference” in Lausanne.
