Ukraine’s Farmland Is a Literal Minefield

Ukraine—Standing at the edge of a partially charred wheat field on a sunny day in April, 33-year-old farmer Maksim Maksimov watched as three of his employees lined up side by side and then slowly walked forward. Two held inexpensive metal detectors, usually sold to hobbyists hunting for coins and metal trinkets, while the third advanced with a shovel in one hand and a bundle of makeshift flags in the other. At the opposite end of the field stood a small trailer, which they had already filled halfway with found remnants of missiles and rockets.

“If the metal detectors beep, we don’t dig, we just plant a flag and move on,” said Yuri Baranov, one of the farmhands.

As his crew walked past the remnants of a rocket, still filled with unexploded cluster ammunition, Maksimov added, “We aren’t actually demining, it’s more of a survey.” With a shrug: “We’ll just drive the tractor around it.”

Over one year into Russia’s war in Ukraine, tens of thousands of square miles of land are potentially littered with mines, unexploded cluster bombs, and remnants of rockets and shells fired by forces on both sides. Farmers are often forced to choose between risking their lives by tending to their fields or risking their livelihoods waiting for the fields to be surveyed and cleared by an official team of civilian or military engineers known as sappers, who specialize in demining operations.

The problem is particularly stark in the agrarian plains of the Kherson region west of the Dnieper River, where Maksimov’s farm is located and where the Ukrainian military last autumn conducted a grueling counteroffensive that culminated in the November liberation of the city of Kherson. About 1.2 million acres of farmland in this area are potentially contaminated, but sappers had surveyed just under 63,000 acres by the end of April, according to officials.

To clear the land in the Kherson region, “at the current pace, with the current number of people and the current amount of equipment, it’s going to take 10 years if not more,” Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, a civilian who is now the spokesperson for the wartime Kherson military administration, told Foreign Policy.

In regions that Ukraine has recaptured, the start of this year’s sowing season in the spring coincided with a litany of accidents involving farmers working in contaminated fields: Between May 8 and 10, four tractors in four different areas of the Kherson and neighboring Mykolaiv regions blew up after they hit mines, injuring their drivers. A similar incident occurred on May 3 in a field in the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine, and again on May 6; on April 22, the explosion of a landmine killed a 30-year-old man in the Kherson region.

Officially, demining is the task of the state. But Ukraine’s state emergency service, or DSNS—the main civilian agency involved in mine clearance operations—is overwhelmed. So too is the military, the other main government actor involved in demining. This has left many frustrated farmers to fend for themselves.

“Everyone does it now,” Dmytro Stetsenko, a farmer in the Kherson region, said. “At first we waited for the state to demine our fields. Then we understood it wouldn’t happen, so we decided to do it ourselves.”

In April, after an unsuccessful request to the DSNS, Stetsenko decided to clear almost 3,000 acres of land he controls “with a bunch of brave guys,” he said. Walking past a tractor that had been hit by shrapnel parked at one of the two farms he owns near the village of Zorivka, he pointed to a pile of discarded rocket tubes and missiles, including a U.S.-made AGM-88 HARM anti-radar missile. Stetsenko’s second farm, near the seaside village of Stanislav, was used for several months as a base by the Russian military and was devastated by strikes during the Ukrainian counteroffensive. There as well, traces of past fighting—including trenches and abandoned Russian howitzers—have turned farming into a potentially deadly activity.

“After the liberation, soldiers straight up told us that the priority for demining were the roads and the villages,” Maksimov said. Military demining is far less thorough than humanitarian demining. But in Ukraine, which is under martial law, the boundaries between the two have become muddled. Maksimov pointed out that, while military units are regularly involved in demining operations for civilians, these are usually limited to the removal of specific, previously identified unexploded ordnance or mines.

For everything else, “you can ask the DSNS to demine your field, but there’s a waitlist and it’s extremely long,” Maksimov said. His employees have found more than 300 remnants of rockets and missiles in his field, some unexploded, but he said the DSNS only came a handful of times to remove individual debris.

At the beginning of Russia’s invasion last year, the DSNS could only field about 600 sappers total. That figure has since grown to 1,000 people, but they remain largely insufficient for a country at war. The Ukrainian government has also granted four foreign nongovernmental organizations and six private Ukrainian companies licenses for mining clearance work.

“The work to do always outstrips the resources,” said Alex van Roy, a former combat engineer in the Australian military and current deputy head of operations at the Fondation Suisse de Déminage (Swiss Demining Foundation), a nongovernmental organization that has been involved in mine action work in Ukraine since 2015. Complex vetting procedures also mean monthslong delays before new organizations can get to work. “It’s always a very procedural process in any country, but particularly in a fairly bureaucratic country like Ukraine,” van Roy added.

Meanwhile, though non-governmental organizations and Ukrainian state institutions perform mine clearance tasks for free, private companies can charge customers for these services. Many Ukrainian commercial companies authorized to work in mine clearance do so at prices out of reach for farmers. Not long after Stetsenko unsuccessfully appealed to the DSNS to get his field demined, he was contacted by what he said was a licensed company, asking for roughly $200 for each acre of land to be demined. This would have added up to half a million dollars to clear his entire plot, a price that neither Stetsenko nor the overwhelming majority of farmers can afford. In January, Tolokonnikov, the Kherson administration spokesman, warned farmers against hiring “dark deminers” who charge for their operations but cannot guarantee that an area has been fully demined.

Some initiatives have attempted to streamline the process of putting farmers eager to see their fields cleared in touch with the authorities. A website known as Military Feodal, launched last year by a Ukrainian startup in cooperation with the agriculture ministry, defense ministry, and DSNS, aims to make it easier for farmers to appeal to the state directly online by allowing them to include the geolocations of areas to be cleared. “The system has received more than 1,000 applications that make up a total of 200,000 hectares [494,000 acres],” Andriy Demianovych, CEO of Feodal, wrote to Foreign Policy.

But the state’s lack of resources remains an inescapable bottleneck. Stretched to the extreme, the DSNS is often forced to deal with more urgent matters. In the northeastern region of Kharkiv, “most of our sappers are currently working on demining electric lines … and I have to tell farmers that we can’t help them at this time,” Ihor Ovcharuk, head of the DSNS’s Interregional Center for Humanitarian Demining, told Ukrainian outlet Suspilne Kharkiv. Deminers are also operating in areas in range of Russian artillery fire, sometimes with deadly consequences: On May 6, six DSNS sappers were killed by Russian shelling in the Kherson region.

“Most of the time, the DSNS’s job is to do what we call emergency risk reduction,” van Roy said. “They’ll come somewhere for a day or two and pick up as much as possible before moving on. It’s extremely important and makes these areas much safer, but it’s not 100 percent.” He said that humanitarian groups, by contrast, run demining checks “very meticulously; 100 percent of the ground, every square centimeter of a particular area is checked to a depth of at least 30 centimeters.”

Over a year into Russia’s invasion, the challenges Ukraine’s farmers face also reflect a larger economic struggle in a country in which, prewar, agriculture made up as much as 41 percent of its overall exports. In 2022, the country’s wheat exports are estimated to have fallen by about 28 percent, according to a February 2023 analysis by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute. The Black Sea Grain Initiative, signed in July 2022, alleviated some of the pressure on the Ukrainian agricultural sector by partially lifting Russia’s blockade on Ukrainian ports, but the agreement remains fragile: Moscow agreed to extend it for two months on May 17, but only after tense negotiations and threats to quit.

In March, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov approved an action plan for demining agrarian land in time for the sowing season. A month later, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal announced a new government demining policy that, among other provisions, would create a new “State Center for Humanitarian Demining” and encourage more Ukrainian and international organizations involved in mine action activities to operate in Ukraine.

But farmers such as Maksimov and Stetsenko have yet to see the follow-through. Back at his farm, Stetsenko has been busy repairing tractors damaged in the fighting while trying to find money to replace other vehicles that were destroyed. “I pay taxes to the government; they need to help us,” he said. “We need to work.”

Tags: Ukraine, Russia, Mykolaiv region, fields, Kherson region, mines, missiles, rockets, cluster bombs, demining