Ukraine’s Contaminated Land: Clearing Landmines With Rakes, Tractors and Drones
This story was produced in partnership with Agence France-Presse (AFP).
In a field near the small town of Bezymenne in southern Ukraine, Viktoria Shynkar carefully picks out a narrow path through the overgrown grass in front of her.
This small corridor of farmland in Mykolaiv Oblast will be checked for the presence of landmines and explosive ordnance.
If clear, Shynkar – a 36-year-old who worked as a hairdresser before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 – will move forward and create another space of the same size.
While she enjoys spending her days outside, it remains painstaking and dangerous work.
Shynkar and her colleagues, who work for the demining charity the Halo Trust, uncovered 243 TM-62 Soviet-designed anti-tank mines left by the Russian army in a neighbouring field.
A chunky and intimidating 32-centimetres in diameter and 13-cm-wide, the TM-62 contains 7.5 kilos of TNT and can puncture a tank if triggered.
The presence of landmines and other unexploded ordnance is a significant issue in Ukraine, impacting civilians and Ukraine’s agricultural industry – a major employer and source of income to the country.
Data Challenges
Numerous bodies have sought to calculate the impact of landmines on Ukraine since the onset of Russia’s full invasion.
Established by the Ministry of Defence, the country’s National Mine Action Centre (NMAC) has produced a map that highlights areas it confirms as hazardous, are suspected of being hazardous as well as those that have been cleared or checked for hazards. It can be seen here and in the image below.
The information is collated from over 80 demining groups operating in the country, which employ people like Shynkar. They collect data from the field and share it with the NMAC who upload it to this map made using the IMSMA platform produced by the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining.
Yet the data the NMAC map contains, while significant, is only partial.
For example, it only creates a picture for the Ukrainian side of the front line, and just parts of it at that, with an area 20 kilometres from the frontline inaccessible to demining groups. Those same demining groups are also not operating in Russian-controlled regions, making the overall picture even less clear.
Furthermore, just because an area may be noted as not being impacted in landmine datasets doesn’t mean that it is not at risk from mines or other explosive ordnance that may not have detonated on impact. Some may simply not have been found yet.
Waiting for Demining Groups To Visit
This is a concern for Ihor Kniazev, a farmer from the town of Dovhen’ke in Kharkiv Oblast. He complains to AFP that he has been waiting a long time for demining groups to visit. “Every year, they promise ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, we will clear all the fields’,” he says.
Kniazev says that he undertook the dangerous task of clearing his own fields with a metal detector. “Everyone clears mines themselves, absolutely everyone,” he insists. He even says that he ran over a mine in his tractor and was lucky not to be injured.
While Kniazev found that his land was indeed contaminated, his predicament highlights an important issue in demining in Ukraine and for farmers returning to areas that were previously occupied or near lines of contact.
While some areas are clearly identified as being mined, there remains uncertainty around those that are only suspected of being mined.
Several experts AFP and Bellingcat spoke to warned of the economic damage that could arise from suspicions that turn out to be incorrect. As a 2024 UN Development Programme report stated, areas suspected of being contaminated but not actually contaminated are either left alone or subjected to the same lengthy clearance process at what can be significant cost.
Such land could otherwise be used to grow crops and help reestablish returning farmers. Ukraine remains a huge food exporter despite the war, ensuring the issue is significant beyond its borders.
Some farmers AFP spoke to highlighted the complexity of trying to figure out which areas were contaminated and which were not.
When Detectors Become Useless
In the town of Kamyanka in Kharkiv Oblast, Victor and Larisa Sysenko talk about their gratitude to a team from the Fondation Suisse de Déminage (FSD) who helped clear their land with the help of a specialist demining machine. “There were lots of explosions under that machine,” recalled Larisa.
Many of the mines were PFM-1 anti-personnel mines, which are more sensitive than anti-tank mines and can be deadly if stepped on by people. The Sysenkos have also had to deal with the danger of unexploded shells, remnants of a Ukrainian assault on retreating Russian troops in 2022 that remained burrowed in the soft soil without exploding.
However, in a selection of other fields nearby, it was a different story as FSD deminers found only three explosive remnants after a long and time-consuming search.
One of the FSD team told AFP that the metal contamination in these fields was “so immense that our detectors became useless, constantly beeping”. Of the thousands of metal fragments detected, the vast majority proved non-explosive.
A few hundred miles to the west in the town of Korobchyne, Mykola Pereverzev describes building a remote-controlled tractor to try and activate all of the mines laid in around 200 hectares of fields present there.
Pereverzev, who works for an agricultural firm, describes the tractor being blown up and building another as the first was beyond repair.
The land is eventually being used again, and Pereverzev is putting down herbicides in the soil to sow sunflowers.
But doubts remain about what may lie beneath.
“Soldiers have the saying that you can pass through one place normally five times, and blow up on the sixth time. Even professionals blow up, so what about us? We are just an agriculture company,” he says.
Falling Exports
Unsurprisingly, Ukraine’s agricultural exports have been severely impacted since the onset of Russia’s full invasion.
The country’s Agriculture Minister, Vitaliy Koval, told AFP that “grain production has dropped from 84 million tons in 2021 to 56 million tons.”.
He continued: “Ukraine has 42 million hectares of agricultural land, including arable land. On paper, we can cultivate 32 million hectares. But available, non-contaminated, non-occupied land? 24 million hectares.”
“When we come to Brussels (to prepare Ukraine’s future EU membership), they show us an infographic saying we have 42 million hectares. But the reality, unfortunately, is 24 million,” Koval said.
Not all of this is down to the presence of landmines or explosive ordnance, of course. Other factors also contribute to agricultural output. These include land being located in areas of ongoing fighting, farm equipment being destroyed or farmers joining the armed forces, fleeing to safety or not returning.
Yet landmines remain a significant part of the mix.
Koval’s office stated that just over 123,000 km2 of land still needs to be assessed for the presence of landmines or explosives. That is a huge area, almost the same size as Greece, much of which remains inaccessible along the 1,500 km frontline.
In terms of agricultural areas that are accessible and have been assessed thus far, however, 14,200 hectares was defined by the Ministry of Agriculture as being contaminated. As of May 2025, 11,800 hectares of this area had been cleared, the ministry said.
To be clear, though, these figures don’t take into account areas that remain suspected of being contaminated or the large frontline area that is currently inaccessible to demining groups, all of which will need to be assessed at some point in the future. If Ukraine was to withdraw from the Ottawa Convention on anti-personnel mines, as it said it would last week, this likely would add another layer of complexity to future demining efforts. Russia never signed the 1997 convention and several of Ukraine’s neighbors have recently signaled they may leave the treaty as well.
Making Choices
Paul Heslop is Programme Manager for Mine Action at the UN Development Programme in Ukraine. Like all experts who were interviewed for this article, he is cautious about making precise estimations as to the scale of the landmine issue given the length of the frontline and the many unknowns that remain in a country at war.
Yet he acknowledges to AFP that it is significant, with likely millions of mines or unexploded shells in the ground in Ukraine.
But he adds that by organising and being strategic about which areas are prioritised for assessment, land that is of the most importance can potentially be put back to productive use first.
The most contaminated land will fall within the area closest to the frontline, he told AFP. Just beyond that, there is still an area that is still significantly impacted, although less intensely, he adds. Within this area “you have got critical infrastructure, bridges, power lines, power plants … transformers, schools, hospitals. They need to be cleared first,” he says.
By way of example, Heslop points to farming areas north of Kyiv or between the Ukrainian capital and Kharkiv that were occupied in the early days of the war. “A lot of that land has now been assessed as not contaminated … or the areas that were contaminated have now been cleared.”
Still, some areas – especially along the current front line area – will be being assessed for a long time, he acknowledges.