Ukraine’s mine-clearers have the war’s most dangerous job: ‘we lose one every day’
- Mine-clearers, or sappers, face deadly risk as they try to make the ground safe, first for fellow soldiers to advance, and eventually for civilians to go home
- Russian troops have sown landmines across hundreds of miles of Ukraine’s front; Kyiv cites this as the main reason their counteroffensive has slowed to a crawl
When they found the bodies of Russian troops at an abandoned position, something about the corpses looked wrong.
“There were three or four of their dead. Two guys were lying on each other, which made us suspicious, because if there had been an explosion they would have been thrown in different directions, but here, one is lying on the other,” said Volodymyr, a 47-year-old sapper with possibly the most dangerous job in Ukraine: clearing landmines at the front.
“We did well by not touching them, because when we reached there with a ‘kitten’, we saw that under them was a PM mine,” he said.
The kitten is a folding steel hook that sappers use to dislodge booby traps, nicknamed for its retractable tongs that spring out like cat’s claws. The PM is a Soviet-era anti-personnel mine.
“It exploded and blew up both of them, but we stayed safe, thank God.”
