Thousands of land mines strewn across Ukrainian territory pose a hazard to civilians. President Volodymyr Zelensky says they are more sinister than missiles.
IZYUM, Ukraine — The day Russian forces withdrew from her Ukrainian town, 69-year-old Lyudmila Ivanenka rushed outside to see which way they were headed.
When she heard Russian forces were evacuating her Ukrainian town, Lyudmila Ivanenka ran to see which direction they going. Then, her life changed in an instant. While Ukraine still possesses stockpiles of such mines, which are expensive to eliminate, a previous Landmine Monitor report found no evidence that Ukraine had used antipersonnel mines in its conflict with Russian-backed separatists since 2014.“there is no independent confirmation … as of yet” of Russian allegations that Ukraine has used such mines in the war this year, but “a final assessment and attribution of use of PFM-type mines in Ukraine is not possible at this time.
“We were looking forward to them leaving, we were waiting for it, you can’t even imagine,” she said of the Russians, describing how they shot her dog dead in front of her during their occupation. “And isn’t it frustrating for such a thing to happen at the very end of the war? At my old age?” “We don’t even know where it got here from and whose mines these were,” Naidenko said. “But there were plenty of them scattered all around Izyum.”
Stories like his were common in the region, Naidenko said. He met another man in the hospital in Russia who stepped on a mine just inside his own front gate. “They drop a whole bunch of mines, and they just fly all around. They could fall anywhere,” he said. Pashchenko, a farmer, had set the twisted metal in his yard, not far from a storage shed that also had been struck by a bomb, roasting 20 tons of potatoes stored inside. “In the beginning, everyone was scared of picking it up,” Pashchenko said of the ordnance as he casually handled a chunk. “But now the shrapnel is everywhere. We’re used to it.”
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