Farmers in parts of Ukraine formerly occupied by Russian troops face one of the largest minefields in the world. Explosives are slow to remove by hand, so some are deploying robots and drones to help speed up the process and kick-start their devastated businesses.
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00:00 This robot is clearing mines in eastern Ukraine.
00:06 The country is now home to one of the largest minefields in the world.
00:12 It's dangerous and slow work to remove and destroy mines by hand.
00:26 Mechanisms and robots are helping speed up the clearance, but all the while armies on
00:30 both sides continue to lay them, in some places up to 500 metres deep.
00:37 Russian minefields have slowed the Ukrainian counter-offensive, but in farming areas freed
00:42 from Russian occupation in 2022, they're still wrecking lives.
00:52 Many farmers, desperate to revive their broken businesses, have taken things into their own
00:56 hands by deploying remote-controlled tractors to detonate mines.
01:02 We went to Ukraine's eastern Kharkiv region to join a demining team and meet the farmers
01:08 still counting the cost of this war's concealed killers.
01:17 This part of eastern Ukraine was overrun by Russian troops in 2022.
01:23 But as they were beaten back, they mined the area to slow the Ukrainian counter-attack.
01:29 It's now the job of landmine charity The Halo Trust to detect and remove the hundreds of
01:34 devices still here.
01:44 Once a device is detected, the grass needs to be cut before the slow work of unearthing
01:49 can begin.
01:52 Before the war, Valeria Shachutska used to be a professional horse rider, performing
01:56 tricks in shows.
01:59 She retrained as a deminer.
02:21 This combine harvester hit two Russian anti-tank mines in August 2022.
02:27 Every yellow post marks a spot where a mine has been removed.
02:39 The dangers are not just mines below ground, but tripwires and unexploded munitions.
02:45 Denis Prokopets runs a large farming business across a swathe of land that was occupied
03:10 by Russian troops in 2022.
03:13 He wants to get the land back into use as soon as possible, so he and his workers are
03:18 taking matters into their own hands.
03:22 These are remote-controlled tractors pulling heavy metal rollers.
03:27 If they hit a mine, it should explode at a safe distance from any people.
03:35 He normally harvests wheat, sunflowers, chickpeas and winter grains.
03:39 But he's only been able to use one-sixth of his land since the Russians were driven
03:43 back because of the threat of mines.
03:48 These are supposed to be lower-risk fields, but they still found eight mines in recent
03:52 months.
03:53 There are also lots of fragments of metal, shrapnel and missiles.
04:00 This is a cluster bomb, a shell capable of scattering a large number of bomblets over
04:04 a wide area.
04:06 There is a chance some of them never exploded.
04:25 This tractor on another farm has the rollers fitted to the front.
04:29 It's also remote-controlled.
04:43 Teams working by hand can clear anything from 100 to 250 square metres a day.
04:49 Rudimentary solutions like this are helping to get farmers back on their land, but they
04:53 don't come with a safety guarantee.
04:56 The Ukrainian army deploys its own demining sappers to clear minefields on the front line.
05:01 They often work with hand-held metal detectors.
05:06 But there are other ways.
05:08 This is a line charge, a string of explosives thrown out across a minefield to clear a path
05:14 for tanks and infantry.
05:18 Drones and robotic vehicles rigged with cameras and sensors are also being used to detect
05:23 and destroy mines.
05:27 Both Russia and Ukraine have been accused of breaking internationally recognised rules
05:32 of war by using anti-personnel mines, which are designed to kill people, not just take
05:38 out armoured vehicles.
05:41 But of course they continue to maim and kill long after wars are over.
05:45 Two deminers from the HALO Trust were injured and one died in an explosion in the southern
05:50 Kherson region in September 2023.
05:55 Ukraine estimates that mines and other dangerous war debris litter up to a third of its total
06:00 territory.
06:13 For the villagers and farmers that live in areas formerly occupied by Russian forces,
06:18 the mines are a daily threat.
06:22 Viktor Ivanovich lives a few miles from the HALO Trust mine clearance site.
06:27 He used to work as a tractor and excavator driver.
06:30 He's now bed-bound.
06:32 He was clearing tree branches from a field when his tractor hit an anti-tank mine.
06:37 The blast badly injured his legs and shrapnel hit him in the face and arms.
06:42 "The smoke was coming out, and it was burning. I had to run away from it. It was like a death.
06:49 My legs were shaking. They were shaking, but I wanted to go. I wanted to go. My heels were
07:00 hurting. I went down, and they were pouring down. It was like they were hanging from a bucket.
07:11 It was a terrible sight."
07:14 He will walk again, but it'll take time. Everyone living around here knows someone who has either
07:19 been killed or injured by mines.
07:21 "I was walking with them. God forbid anyone got hurt. I didn't smoke for over a month.
07:49 I don't know why I did it. I don't know what I did. I don't know if I did it for the money.
07:59 I don't know if I did it for the money. I don't know if I did it for the money. I don't know.
08:04 I don't know. I don't know. I don't know."
08:24 Denis managed to flee the area before the Russians showed up at his farm in March 2022.
08:34 When he came back in September, the place was a wreck.
08:37 "We had a barn here. We kept the animals' food here. Then we got hit by a mine and everything
08:56 burned down."
08:57 Grain storage barns had been shelled. Animals slaughtered.
09:00 "They knocked down the doors and took the animals out. First they shot them, then they took the orcs out."
09:08 The farm had 70,000 animals before the occupation. It lost 90%.
09:17 "It's hard to imagine what happened here when the pigs were here. You see the cassette tape.
09:24 The fragments are flying around. The animals are dying. You come in and there's a cart.
09:29 Up to a hundred or more animals are dead."
09:32 Those that weren't shot or killed in shelling starved. The electricity was cut so the feeding
09:37 and water systems broke.
09:42 "The orcs came and drove on these roads. They drove around the village and the roads.
09:48 One time a guy came and said, 'We need to feed the pigs.'
09:53 They said, 'We don't need our pigs. We're the owners of our lives.'
09:59 Those were bad times. God forbid they come back."
10:11 Denis estimates the loss of livestock, damage to machinery and buildings to be about $15 million.
10:18 But that doesn't include years of lost revenue from the fields they can't use.
10:36 The damage done to Ukraine's farming sector runs into the tens of billions of dollars.
10:41 And it could take decades to rebuild, demine and decontaminate the land.
10:47 Even if farms can grow crops, there's the problem of exporting them,
10:52 as Russia continues to attack Ukraine's ports on the Black Sea and disrupt shipping routes.
10:58 Frontline farms are of course suffering more than most.
11:01 With so much land too dangerous to cultivate, nature has begun to rewild fields,
11:06 turning zones either side of the frontline green.
11:11 Yuri Vovchenko's farm is not far from Denis'.
11:16 He remembers the day the Russians came like it was yesterday.
11:21 "On March 3rd, the land was completely full of machinery,
11:26 and there were tanks and APCs and separate vehicles.
11:33 They had one question, why nobody meets us when we pass through the village.
11:39 For us, it's like we're not liberators, but invaders."
11:46 Here, 2,000 head of cattle were reduced to 228 in a matter of weeks.
11:52 Only 8 of 68 sheep survived.
11:55 The majority were hit by Grad rockets or shot.
11:59 Yuri fled the village with his family on March 5th, 2022.
12:04 The cows that survived weren't milked for months, so their supply dried up.
12:09 When Yuri tried moving the remaining cows to new pastures in September,
12:13 some died after stepping on mines.
12:17 He is slowly building back his herd and has started making cheese, even ice cream.
12:23 A kind of barter system has emerged in this once-occupied zone.
12:27 Yuri trades milk for building materials and hay for cattle.
12:32 "What we're trying to survive and do now,
12:35 is to live like we did in the 19th century, with these barrels and milk pipes.
12:41 We've lost 1.5 billion hryvnias.
12:48 This is all machinery, buildings,
12:51 more than 2,000 different crops, wheat, wheatgrass, and so on."
12:58 His cattle barns are slowly turning into chicken sheds.
13:04 They don't have the time or the money to bring back large-scale cattle farming.
13:08 These chickens are four months old and have started laying their first eggs.
13:13 Many people never return to the area,
13:16 but Yuri sees bringing his farm back to life as important as fighting on the front line.
13:22 "I've spoken to many of our frontline soldiers,
13:28 and they tell me a lot about it.
13:32 They say, 'If you don't work, if you don't manage the roof,
13:38 if you don't develop, if you don't mine,
13:41 then what we're doing on the front line is all in vain.
13:45 We're fighting for our land, for our families,
13:51 and you should work like you never did before.'"
13:55 "We're fighting for our land, for our families, and you should work like you never did before."
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