Four soldiers are walking in single file under the cover of a tree line, occasionally crouching motionless beside a tree trunk to avoid a drone looking for them. As the buzzing fades, the group moves on. At one point, the leader halts and points at the ground, warning his comrades: “lepistok”, meaning “leaf”, he says, pointing to a palm-sized Russian mine. But the sound gives them away – the drone immediately appears above, already dropping a grenade as the squad makes an attempt to hide from the airborne danger, still dodging mines with eyes fixed to the ground.
A few days later, the situation will be entirely different: they’ll have to fight under conditions very similar to these in the Kursk salient (which was not yet retaken by the Russians at the time of the exercise – ed.).
Walking the edge of death
Walking along a heavily mined one-kilometre stretch in two hours: no Western army would take this risk, but this is the reality of the Ukrainian soldier
– comments Dale, the Swedish ex-soldier holding the advanced demining training for troops pulled back from the Kursk salient for a military exercise.
Hermés Pichon
Having already been discharged and carrying enormous experience, he arrived in Ukraine after the beginning of the invasion to provide training. According to him, almost everything he had previously known about mines has now been replaced or become obsolete. One of the soldiers who had participated in his earlier courses recently stepped on a mine just 15 metres away from a North Korean machine gun nest.
“You can’t follow the textbook if you’re 15 metres from a North Korean position, right? There’s simply no time to probe the ground or use a metal detector, which is why our training focuses on visual mine recognition” – he says. This is riskier than what he had been trained for, but due to drones, one has to move quickly on the battlefield.
In this training, ultimately, we are increasing the level of risk-taking related to mines in order to be faster.
After the Russian army’s 2022 invasion, Ukraine has become one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. In the eastern provinces, the contaminated area is estimated at 140,000 square kilometres – that’s nearly one and a half times the size of Hungary. Compared to planted mines, unexploded shells pose an even greater danger. This level of contamination is almost unprecedented: while previously the border between the two Koreas was considered the longest continuous minefield at its own whopping 170 kilometres, Ukraine’s thousand-kilometre frozen front line has quickly shot to the top of the list.
According to Dale, the Russian doctrine regarding mines has also changed since 2022: at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the fast-moving Russian troops laid tactical minefields around their encampments and the occupied villages while they rested, usually removing them before advancing further into the country. This changed at the end of 2022 with the arrival of the Wagner mercenary group, whose members brought with them the tricks of homemade bomb-making (IED, or “improvised explosive device”), a knowledge acquired during their previous deployments against terrorists in Syria and Africa.
These improvised traps were then often hidden beneath corpses, discarded weapons, and ammunition boxes during the retreats from Kharkiv and Kherson, so that the trap would explode into the hand or face of an unwary or battle-weary Ukrainian soldier.
The next turning point came with the stabilisation of the frontline and the looming threat of the large-scale Ukrainian counteroffensive in Zaporizhzhia. “The Russian divisional-level engineering units, the likes of which are really hard to find anywhere in the world, were given free rein to do as they pleased, on a massive scale” – says Dale. “And they built the largest minefield the world has ever seen”.
The post „I found seven mines in my garden, I reused all of them” – a crash course in survival on Ukrainian minefields first appeared on 24.hu.