4 days ago
Inside the Scottish charity working to demine Ukraine
Three years after the liberation of Chernihiv Oblast, the main threat in Budy no longer comes from the air, but lingers in the forests and sunflower fields.
I'm two hours north of Kyiv with Scottish demining charity The HALO Trust, which has detected and destroyed almost 7000 explosive devices across 1.82 million square metres of land in the Chernihiv region, while 1.71 million square metres remain contaminated.
'Ukraine is now the most mined country in the world and the threats are different across the country,' HALO sub-unit commander Mykyta Kryzhanovskyi says. 'The impact of the Russian invasion is so huge that we'll have work to do for decades.'
The Ukrainian Government estimates that an area larger than the size of Greece will need to be surveyed nationwide. As of December 2024, the UN reported almost 1,500 civilian mine casualties in Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
In a secured field, we are given PPE – body armour and visors – and a safety briefing by HALO staff.
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Kryzhanovskyi, a former paediatric anaesthetist in Odesa, southern Ukraine, joined in 2023. 'I wanted to help my country on a larger scale and I saw that HALO needed people,' he says.
'I'm happy to be part of this global process now in Ukraine.' He jokes, asking if I – as a Scot – have been 'sent from HQ'.
The HALO Trust, founded in 1988 and based in Thornhill near Dumfries, employs 58 staff in Scotland and 8700 worldwide. The organisation gained global recognition during Princess Diana's visit to Angola's minefields in the 1990s.
In 2016, HALO began work in Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions following Russia's 2014 invasion and has since grown its local staff from 400 to 1600 to help secure a safer future for Ukrainians living alongside these remnants of conflict.
We watch as the staff present their tasks, referencing colour-coded maps of affected areas.
Between March and April 2022, they explain, Ukrainian soldiers set up defensive positions on Budy's outskirts, laying anti-personnel and anti-vehicle mines and enduring heavy shelling from multiple launch rocket systems, tanks, mortars, cluster munitions and small arms from three Russian-occupied villages nearby.
The village remains damaged and civilians have been killed or injured by mines and unexploded ordnance.
The main threats in this region, Kryzhankovskyi says, are tripwires loaded with grenades, submunitions and anti-vehicle mines. Blast scars from the fighting in surrounding fields are clearly visible in satellite imagery.
Surveying the land from above using aerial photography and AI technology is revolutionising mine clearance. Image analyst Oleksandr Tereshchenko and drone pilot Serhii Pasholok demonstrate remote sensing using a large drone – a technique pioneered by HALO since the full invasion began, speeding-up the detection of war debris and minimising the risks of boots on the ground.
'We started with just the two of us,' Oleksandr says. 'With huge support from our colleagues in Scotland, this department has now expanded to more than 20 people.'
The large drone surveys territory using a camera with high-resolution zoom capabilities, creating imagery that preserves scale. Using AI, a final map report is produced, pinpointing abnormalities on the ground for survey staff to focus on across vast swathes of land. While watching Tereshchenko's monitor, the camera hones in on a dummy blue mine as cows nonchalantly chew grass nearby.
Drones aren't the only technology used in modern mine clearance. We look on as a Seppi Max 50 vehicle – controlled remotely by an operator wearing a VR headset and protected by an armoured shield – roams the ground.
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These machines clear vegetation, tripwires and munitions, absorbing blasts from any explosions and accelerating the demining process with lower risks to staff. 'In this area, we had an incident involving our demining machine – it detonated a TM-62M anti-vehicle mine in a metal casing,' Kyrylo Holovko, Task Group Commander, says. The robot isn't entirely reliable: staff must sweep the area manually afterwards.
Many of HALO's 1600 staff across six regions in Ukraine are internally displaced people who have reskilled to assist the war effort, and 30% are women. In the dense forests where the robot can't operate, deminers use metal detectors in a painstaking manual process.
Wooden posts mark locations of detected and destroyed debris, with a description of the type of ordnance found, its depth and the date of clearance noted. 23mm and 30mm cannon rounds – with a lethal blast radius of one to five metres or beyond – are commonly found in this area. Our eyes widen as we pass a post marking a KTM-1 high-explosive projectile fuze, recently found at a depth of ten centimetres and cleared.
On the edge of the forest, Viacheslav Baliurko is on his knees, manually excavating a small patch of ground. Before the full-scale invasion he worked in reproductive medicine, helping to increase Ukraine's birth rate – a task that became 'impossible' after the full-scale invasion began.
Viacheslav Baliurko'I saw a HALO job advert online, I was curious and decided that this is where I would be most useful,' he says. 'Before, I worked to make sure there were children and now I work to make sure those children can walk freely and safely.'
As Viacheslav scrapes away the soil in 5-10cm layers by hand, repeatedly sweeping each section with a metal detector and marking the areas where a signal sounds, the instrument buzzes. 'There's something here!' he says. Fortunately, it's just a scrap of metal, which he tosses aside into a bucket.
The staff are keenly aware of the risks of such dangerous work. Maryna Kostiuk was previously a nursery teacher in Sloviansk, Donetsk region and followed her husband into the organisation after being displaced to Kyiv.
'I couldn't just sit at home, I wanted to do something useful,' she says. 'Sometimes it's scary because we understand that we work with explosive objects, but I really like the job and we follow all safety rules and instructions.'
In December 2023, HALO Ukraine completed national certification in explosive ordnance disposal (EOD), enabling greater efficiency while reducing the strain on national authorities. For the specialist technicians who dispose of complex ordnance including IEDs and booby-traps, the risks can increase. In May, widely-respected British EOD volunteer Chris 'Swampy' Garrett – founder of the mine clearance nonprofit Prevail, who worked alongside the Ukrainian Army and National Police – was killed alongside a colleague in an incident in eastern Ukraine.
From the fields opposite, a whistle blows and the forest deminers walk to a safe area and remove their visors for a break.
Kateryna Vechkanova, from Kostiantynivka in the Donetsk region, joined HALO two years ago. Today, she is scanning the forest floor for 9N210/9N235-type cluster munitions and other ordnance.
Kateryna Vechkanova'We used to go outdoors as a family every weekend,' Kateryna says.
'I joined so that someday I can take my children to the forest and live as before. We will clear our land so that it can be ploughed, planted, walked on safely and we can breathe freely.'
As the world's breadbasket, Ukraine's mine-contaminated crop fields have devastated the agricultural economy.
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Since 2022, the UK government has contributed £12.9 million to HALO Ukraine, returning 688,760m2 of land.
'The release of agricultural land back to communities is enabling the production of corn, wheat, sunflower oil, and other agricultural products that are exported globally and is part of ensuring a stable global food market amidst the ongoing conflict,' says Calum Craig, policy and advocacy manager at The HALO Trust.
In 2022, a Budy farmer was seriously injured after detonating a mine with his tractor while cultivating his crops.
'The work on these areas is very important for us, as many people were left without their regular income from agricultural activities,' says Holovko.
'In Budy, there are 72 beneficiaries to whom we will hand over these territories after clearance so that they can continue to safely use this land.'
Elsewhere in the Chernihiv region, a family picking mushrooms were killed after their car triggered a mine in 2022.
As the autumn foraging season approaches, Kostiuk wishes for the simple pleasure of spending time in nature with her child again. 'We really loved to walk in the forest and pick mushrooms,' she says. 'But now our forests are heavily mined and it's too dangerous.'
In addition to demining operations, HALO teams organise mine awareness sessions for the community, teaching children and adults how to live safely in affected areas. 'So far, about 54,000 people in the Chernihiv region have been informed,' Kryzhanovskyi says.
While HALO unearths the lethal legacies embedded in Ukrainian soil, the global conversation on future mine use is shifting. Since Ukraine and five other European countries recently announced plans to withdraw from the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel mines, citing an increasing Russian military threat, the issues surrounding mine use have been brought to the fore.
'The Ottawa Treaty is a key part of the human security architecture of tomorrow and one of the great successes of recent times,' Craig says.
'It has been instrumental in saving millions lives with more than 55 million AP mines destroyed since 1997 and over 30 countries now mine free. HALO believes in the rules-based international system and we urge all signatories to the Treaty to stay firm and adhere to global norms on landmines.'
In the forest, the whistle sounds again as we prepare to leave. For this dedicated group of deminers, however, the work continues. They don their vests and visors once more.
'We don't have a deadline for our work,' Kryzhanovskyi says. 'I don't want other countries to forget that this problem is not solved. We're doing our best job and the war is still going on.'
This reporting was supported by the International Women's Media Foundation's Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine's Unseen Frontlines Initiative in partnership with the Howard G Buffett Foundation.
