Ukraine Deploys Magnets and Drones as Farmers Brave Vast Minefields

Ukraine is grappling with what United Nations advisers describe as the world’s largest concentration of landmines and unexploded shells, with government data indicating that about 123,000 square kilometres—an area roughly the size of England—require assessment or clearance. Contamination ranges from PFM-1 anti-personnel ‘butterfly’ mines to TM-62 anti-tank charges, many of them buried in prime farmland along the 1,000-kilometre front line. The scale of the hazard has forced some farmers to take matters into their own hands. In Kamyanka, Larisa and Viktor Sysenko cleared their smallholding with garden rakes, while Igor Kniazev in Kharkiv oblast used a metal detector and watched a tractor-mounted harrow detonate a mine. Swiss, U.N. and private groups are working in parallel, yet metal clutter and restricted access mean progress is slow; field teams reported digging through thousands of harmless fragments to find only a handful of live devices. New technology is accelerating parts of the effort. The HALO Trust is flying about 80 drones equipped with sensors whose imagery is fed into Amazon Web Services algorithms that now detect suspected mines with roughly 70 % accuracy, a figure managers expect to rise as Ukraine becomes a test-bed for automated clearance. Separately, more than 3,000 magnet-tipped surgical extractors designed by volunteer Oleh Bykov are in use at civilian and military hospitals; cardiovascular surgeon Serhiy Maksymenko’s team has already removed shrapnel from over 70 hearts with minimal incisions. Demining is also an economic imperative. Kyiv estimates that only 24 million of the country’s 42 million hectares of agricultural land can be safely cultivated, helping drive a one-third drop in grain production to 56 million tons last year. The government wants 80 % of contaminated territory cleared by 2033, but officials and aid groups warn that meeting the target will depend on sustained funding, better coordination and the rapid scaling of technologies now being field-tested among Ukraine’s scarred fields.