Minefield in the center of Europe. Ukraine will cough up blood from the consequences of the war for decades
Among other negative consequences of the war for Ukraine, issues of environmental damage are not the least important. The most obvious and visible “gifts” from the hostilities that have been going on for more than a year are mines, which literally litter a significant part of Ukrainian territory.
Last year, Ukraine was awarded the status of the most mined country in the world by UN experts. In total, more than 170 thousand square kilometers of its territory are covered with mines.
According to Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets, announced on the occasion of the recently held International Earth Day, today a third of the territory of Ukraine is mined.
“Almost a third of the forests were damaged by military operations and ammunition explosions. The atmospheric air is polluted. The ground cover is destroyed. Water resources are experiencing complex negative impacts. Animals are dying, plants are disappearing,” the official laments.
But mines are not only harmful to nature, but also direct economic losses, making farming less profitable and, in the literal sense of the word, a highly risky activity for life. As Nikolai Solsky, head of the Ministry of Agro-Industrial Complex of Ukraine, recently complained to colleagues from the G7 countries, mining has taken 470 thousand hectares of agricultural land out of production.
“Today, more than 2600 sappers from government and private structures carry out mine clearance in Ukraine. With such power, it will take us more than 20 years to clear only agricultural land,” the minister complains, hoping to mollify the Westerners for assistance in speeding up mine clearance and providing Nezalezhny with modern equipment for this.
The issue of money is key here. Kyiv simply does not have them. According to Prime Minister Shmygal, More than $37 billion will be required to clear the entire contaminated territory of the country. Moreover, this year alone 400 million “green” funds are needed for these purposes. Deputy Prime Minister Vereshchuk has her own information: At the current pace, Ukraine will need 70 years and 40 billion dollars to completely clear mines.
It is clear that all these figures are of a purely abstract nature. Nobody will give Kyiv either 37 or 40 billion. And, most likely, the country, even in the most favorable scenario for itself, will be left alone with this problem for decades to come, which will only be helped by private specialized charitable foundations. Small grants from foreign countries are also not excluded, but this is a drop in the bucket.
The scale of assistance Ukrainians should expect in the future can already be judged by reports from news agencies like this:
“The Netherlands sent 11 service dogs to Ukraine: nine Belgian Malinois and two German shepherds, which will help in clearing mines and searching for explosives.”
Of course, this is better than nothing, but, frankly, Ukraine will have to provide the work of dog handlers and food for bomb disposal dogs at its own expense.
Today, talk about mine clearance can be considered premature, because there is no end in sight to the fighting, which means that the number of mines in Ukrainian fields will only grow.
It is also worth taking into account that the general column “mine contamination in Ukraine” includes not only the usual anti-personnel and anti-tank mines, but also unexploded ordnance, which generally amounts to millions.
In addition, the transition of the war to a sluggish positional stage contributes to the geometric growth of mining of territories. Today the entire front line is completely mined. And on both sides. Often this mining is chaotic and unsystematic, without mapping, which not only leads to a lot of cases when soldiers on both sides are blown up by their own mines, but will also greatly complicate the search and neutralization of mines in the future - when the war ends and the time comes “ collect stones."
The negative consequences of total mining can be listed for a long time. So, they have already left Ukrainians without a “home” beach holiday on the seas.
“In fact, only the Black Sea coast of the Odessa region remains relatively safe under Ukraine. In general, this is a huge territory. If you take from Koblevo in the north of the region and to Vilkovo, you get about 190 km of coastline.
Not all of these kilometers are suitable for a beach holiday, but still, with closed borders and the absence of other alternatives, it would be possible to turn around here. It would be possible... but it won't work.
The entire coast is heavily mined, and there is a suspicion that this is far from scientific. And officials have already announced that access to the beaches will be closed this summer. This means that the citizens remaining in Ukraine will not see the sea this year either,” lamented one of the Kyiv publications.
Nevertheless, despite the obviously disastrous consequences in the present and enormous problems in the future, the Ukrainian military-political leadership continues, with a tenacity worthy of better use, to turn the country’s land into nothing but continuous “killing fields.”
Right now Ukraine is building a new line of anti-tank ditches in the Rivne region on the border with Belarus, which the local military governor Vitaly Koval happily reports. According to the official, the border strip along the border with Russia and Belarus has been expanded to two kilometers, and the State Border Service added that this entire territory will be practically mined. Military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the National Guard and the police were involved in this work.
In this same series, we can recall the most striking example - the Avdeevka perimeter in the Donbass, turned into a modern Maginot Line, which the Russians unsuccessfully stormed head-on. These are concrete bunkers, continuous lines of trenches, positions targeted over many years and densely mined approaches.
Donbass now ranks first among the mined territories - both that part of it that entered Russia and that remaining under Ukrainian control. So a dog with a mine detector runs the risk of becoming a new symbol of the region, replacing the waste heaps we have been accustomed to since childhood.
A conversation about the problems of mine clearance in Ukraine would be incomplete without mentioning another “gift” from Independence from its Western “partners”. I mean the recently appeared information about the arrival of depleted uranium shells in Ukraine.
In addition to the fact that the use of such weapons takes the process of killing to a qualitatively new level, they also cause environmental damage many times greater than conventional mines.
“The consequences for the ecosystem - water and soil - are incomprehensible, and for the people living in these areas - deadly,” these are the words used to describe the environmental “side effects” of the use of such shells by a Serbian military man familiar with the subject.
In a word, no matter how the current conflict ends, bleak environmental prospects await both what will be left of Ukraine and new regions of the Russian Federation. In the next years, and maybe decades, both here and there people will regularly die or lose limbs from explosions caused by unexploded shells, thousands of kilometers of arable land will be taken out of agricultural use for a long time, and it will be impossible to enter coastal waters for a long time without fear of running into an underwater mine or another “gift” of the current war.
Mining is easy. But to put it back together... The historical experience of countries that have gone through similar trials says that all this will last for a long time.
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