Ukraine is littered with landmines on a scale last seen in Vietnam. How can they be removed?

A Halo Trust deminer working in a field. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The GuardianFaced with deadlier threats, demining groups are coming up with new ways of working using drones and AI

Crouched over on her hands and knees in a field of weeds, Olena Kabanova is digging into the ground. With a shovel and a steady hand, the 58-year-old digs out a neat square around the spot where a mine detector has sensed a suspicious object.

Four years ago, this field in eastern Ukraine was occupied by Russian soldiers. Now back under Ukrainian control, it is littered with landmines. Civilians such as Kabanova are trying to make the land usable again.

Landmines are a scourge of conflict zones. Littered across contested territory, they leave land unusable for years after a war has ended. Removing them is an expensive and dangerous job. And the use of long-range drones in Ukraine, which is often described as the most mine-contaminated country in the world, is increasing the scale of the problem.

View image in fullscreenDifferent types of ammunition presented at the Halo Trust office in Kharkiv. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian“What we’re now seeing is the massive increase in the use of drone-delivered munitions,” says Paul Heslop, the programme manager for mine action at the United Nations Development Programme in Ukraine. “What already was a very high-intensity battle area is now potentially, through the use of drones on both sides, becoming a much wider area of contamination and a scale that we haven’t seen since the Americans were dropping cluster munitions on the Ho Chi Minh trail.”

View image in fullscreenOlena Kabanova, a deminer with the Halo Trust, working at the site in the Kharkiv region. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The GuardianThe task of clearing landmines from Ukraine is replete with challenges. Drone and missile attacks make working outdoors unsafe; humanitarian workers are sometimes directly targeted. And newer, deadlier threats are also appearing. They include the POM-3, a small cylindrical mine used by Russian forces that could be mistaken for an abandoned vacuum flask. It is detonated by the vibrations of approaching footsteps.

POM-3 mines mean there are “specific villages that we just completely avoid”, says Anda Riza, a unit commander of the Halo Trust, the largest international humanitarian demining organisation in Ukraine, which employs Kabanova in the field in Kharkiv. The types of landmines are “constantly developing and evolving”, says Valeriia Shumska, Riza’s colleague.

View image in fullscreenValeriia Shumska, an operations support manager with the Halo Trust, at the site in the Kharkiv region. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The GuardianBut the technological innovation that is emerging from the conflict is also helping deminers to come up with new ways of working, which they hope are quicker and safer than the traditional hands-and-knees approach. The advances are being supported by the $1.5bn funding that has poured into Ukraine’s demining sector since the start of the full-scale invasion.

Take Kabanova’s job. Digging out a patch of land could take up to 45 minutes. But a new machine can do it in five. Called the DMR-7, it is a small, tank-like vehicle fitted with a hosepipe that shoots out jet flows of compressed air.

The tank is operated by a human using a remote controller who stands at a safe distance away. The operator manoeuvres the tank into place and then, with a loud mechanical whirring and plumes of dirt billowing skywards, the DMR-7 uses the force of compressed air to blast away a small patch of soil. It is a bulky, expensive alternative to a shovel, but it’s one that deminers hope can make one of the most dangerous parts of the demining process quicker and safer.

View image in fullscreenUsing a remote control, an operator moves a grenade found at the demining site. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The GuardianThe DMR-7 is just one of a host of new pieces of kit that the Halo Trust is experimenting with in Ukraine. Other technologies include AI-powered image analysis, ground-penetrating radar and devices that can detect explosive material, not just metal.

Just as drones have transformed the battlefield, they have also created new opportunities for humanitarians. Before 2022, much of Halo’s surveillance work – looking for signs of explosives – was done with binoculars and maps. Now it is done with drones, and satellite imagery, which can be analysed with the help of AI.

But war has also led to innovations in anti-drone technology. Drone jamming systems, used by both Russian and Ukrainian forces, can interfere with humanitarian work. Halo has lost several drones to jamming and spoofing attacks.

And the advances in new technology are not spread equally between providers.

In a field adjacent to one that Kabanova is working in, staff from the state emergency services are also clearing mines. Under the glare of the late summer sun, Mykyta Shulzhenko, the head of the mechanised demining unit, says his colleagues have started using drones for surveillance. But they are not yet able to use AI to analyse the drone-captured imagery. “I really hope this kind of technology will be implemented soon in our work,” he says.

View image in fullscreenMykyta Shulzhenko, the head of the mechanised demining unit of the state emergency service of Ukraine, at a demining site in the Kharkiv region. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The GuardianThe Halo Trust alone spent nearly £50m in Ukraine in the year to 31 March 2025, dwarfing the state’s annual budget of £28.6m for a programme to clear agricultural land of mines and unexploded ordnance. And there are dozens of other demining organisations with overlapping responsibilities and approaches. Responsibility for the sector is split across multiple government agencies. Attempts to reform the country’s mine action law to bring it in line with international standards have faltered.

Ihor Bezkaravainyi, a deputy economy minister who leads the country’s work on demining, wants to streamline the policymaking process to create one cabinet-level office to oversee the whole sector. But progress has been slow. Asked why, he offers a weary shrug: “Because, people.”

View image in fullscreenIhor Bezkaravainyi, a deputy economy minister, leads work on demining in Ukraine. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian“When we’re talking about a new law, it will mean that some government bodies will lose responsibility, and, they think, power,” Bezkaravainyi says.

One person who has worked in Ukraine’s demining sector puts it more bluntly: “The biggest barrier to demining Ukraine is the government of Ukraine.”

Bezkaravainyi says: “When we’re talking about an ordinary situation with mine action … the conflict has ended, and the government does not exist … in Ukraine, it’s the opposite situation.”

That leads to a host of regulatory and bureaucratic barriers. For example, deminers are often prevented from using vehicles that are driven directly by a person, with health and safety standards requiring that the vehicles are operated remotely. Riza says: “We know for a fact that doing it remotely is much slower than having a person in the cab. That continues to be our biggest challenge.”

View image in fullscreenA deminer operating remotely behind a protective shield. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The GuardianHeslop argues that the Ukrainian authorities are overly broad in their categorisation of land as being contaminated by mines, an approach that risks wasting time and money on clearing land that wasn’t dangerous in the first place. “Just because it was occupied by the Russians doesn’t necessarily mean it was contaminated,” he says. “Land is only contaminated if it’s got fucking explosives in it.”

But deminers across the sector agree that technological advances will accelerate their ability to release Ukraine’s richly fertile land for civilian use at a much faster rate than has been possible in the past.

“This is the cutting edge of technology,” says Heslop. “This is where the humanitarian mine action sector is going through the biggest pivot in the last 30 years.”

Additional research by Illia Dyadik and Artem Mazhulin