NOVOLUHANSKE, Ukraine — Oleksandr Hordiyenko, a young man with tattoos all over his arms, kneels in a line of wood in the Donbas war zone.
A blue armored vest squeezes his body and a plastic face shield burdens his head but he keeps his breath steady. Slowly, carefully, he puts a probe — a plastic fishing rod — into a heap of dry leaves and grass on the ground.
He turns over every inch in front of him, gradually working his way forward. All attention is on the probe’s white tip that may reveal what a naked eye would surely miss — a booby trap tripwire.
He exhales: this patch of ground looks clear. Now he has to scan it with a metal detector and move on. Thirty centimeters ahead, he has to do it all again.
Hordiyenko is one of many locals trained and employed by HALO Trust, a Scottish charity that does humanitarian demining in conflict zones across the world, including the Donbas.
Since it began in 2014, Russia’s ongoing war here has claimed 14,000 lives and left a legacy that may claim many more in decades to come.
Tens of thousands of landmines, booby traps and unexploded projectiles still lurk throughout the depopulated war zone, often next to its rare islands of life. Time and again, they kill and dismember both soldiers and civilians who never expect to run into a death trap so far away from the front line.
Like Hordiyenko, dozens of locals work for HALO to help clear their home areas.
The job entails years of crawling on all fours, scrutinizing every part of old battlefields. This is the only way to make sure that another child isn’t erased by an unmarked landmine on the outskirts of their village.
A HALO Trust deminer works in a dense grove in the war zone of Donbas near the village of Novoluhanske on April 30, 2021. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Killing fields
The organization employs nearly 400 locals working all along the 420-kilometer front line.
Many of them ask not to be photographed or identified in the media — they do not want trouble for their relatives in the Russian-occupied zone.
The Kodema-Novoluhanske team in Donetsk Oblast, not far from the city of Bakhmut, works in a wood line that runs along a dirt trail leading to the town of Travneve, the final frontier controlled by Ukraine. The front line is five kilometers to the south, across an empty steppe.
The area is marked with dozens of signs painted with red skulls and the words “Halt! Landmines!”
The deminers take a short break. An elderly cyclist rides past the team, headed to the nearby village of Semihiriya, probably to visit the only grocery store in many kilometers.
A HALO Trust deminer demonstrates booby trap defuse technique in the war zone of Donbas near the village of Novoluhanske on April 30, 2021. (Volodymyr Petrov)
“Alright, back to hazardous work now!” a group leader shouts and blows a whistle as the old man leaves the area.
The deminers don their face screens and pour back into dry foliage beneath the bushes. The silent hunt for booby traps resumes.
At first glimpse, their meticulous grunting over every square meter seems to make no sense. But this is a dangerous misconception.
This area once was the scene of fierce fighting between the Ukrainian military and the combined forces of Russia and the militants it sponsors during the major Battle of Debaltseve in early 2015.
Heavy artillery exchanges left dozens, if not thousands of unexploded shells scattered in the fields. Infantry planted scores of booby traps and anti-tank landmines in the woods and on dirt trails.
Years later, stories of people getting their legs blown off are common in these parts.
A HALO Trust deminer works in a dense grove in the war zone of Donbas near the village of Novoluhanske on April 30, 2021. (Volodymyr Petrov)
One tractor driver was dismembered when he struck an anti-tank landmine in a nearby field, the same field he used to harvest just a year earlier.
Another local resident went missing for weeks during winter. His mutilated body finally turned up during the spring thaw. It looked like the man got off a bus, strayed from the usual path home, and walked into an OZM‑72 landmine, which filled him with shrapnel.
In the town of Novoluhanske a few kilometers away, a local man had a quarrel with his wife and stormed out of his house. He soon returned, half-conscious and covered in blood, begging for help. He shortly died in an ambulance, also killed by an OZM‑72.
Three service members of Ukraine’s 59th Motorized Brigade were killed on the spot when they stuck an anti-tank landmine on the road near Novoluhanske on Feb. 14, 2021. Two other soldiers of Ukraine’s 30th Mechanized Brigade were also killed by an unmarked explosive device in March 2015, in the same patch of wood where the HALO deminers now work.
Bringing back life
In many villages near the front line, children grow up with one basic rule: never go into groves.
“We coach ordinary people on personal safety,” says Dariya Bohovarova, a HALO deminer originally from Novoluhanske. “Locals know best where potential dangers are. Kids know that if they find something that looks like a hazardous device, they have to walk away the same way they came and immediately call for adults.”
In spite of the precautions, people are killed almost every month.
According to Ukraine’s military, nearly 2,600 civilians, including over 240 children, have been killed by various explosive objects since 2014.
In Donbas, an area of nearly 16,000 square kilometers is contaminated with unmarked landmines and other hazardous devices, making Ukraine one of the world’s most dangerous countries in this regard.
Recently, HALO’s Novoluhanske-Kodema team successfully detected three wired grenades in this area.
A HALO Trust deminer works in a dense grove in the war zone of Donbas near the village of Novoluhanske on April 30, 2021. (Volodymyr Petrov)
“Booby traps are the worst,” says the group’s senior supervisor, Andriy Kryvokon.
“Very keen attention and sight are required (to spot them.) Just imagine a wild field of tall bushes and grass that hasn’t been touched in years. A wire is very hard to notice.”
Traps may become more dangerous with time. If a bomb is cocked with a simple fishing line, weather and wildfires can eventually rot it away.
If copper wire is used, the trap can survive indefinitely. The team knows of a local woman whose legs were blown up with an F1 grenade on a tripwire planted in the field at least three years earlier.
The team’s operational map is speckled with dots marking every hazardous object detected and secured. Since 2017, it has found over 60 anti-vehicle- and anti-personnel landmines and over 100 unexploded projectiles and traps in the Novoluhanske area alone.
Many explosives are probably still out there.
As deminers say, each mark on their maps represents a driver, a fisherman, or a gardener coming home safe.
A HALO Trust deminer demonstrates booby trap defuse technique in the war zone of Donbas near the village of Novoluhanske on April 30, 2021. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Kryvokon, a former Ukrainian military minesweeper, walks back to his car across a large field after inspecting his team in the grove.
This giant square of black soil is the pride of his career. It was once a scary wilderness, littered with bombs. Now that his team has swept them out, people don’t have to watch their step here anymore.
“I’d love to see tractors harvesting crops in this field again,” he says as he puts his sweaty armored vest into his trunk.
“You know, we have spots where a family has a patch of land and no other way to earn a living. We can come and help demine their kitchen garden, and this gives these people a chance.”
“You help bring life back to these parts — and that is the coolest thing about this job.”
A HALO Trust deminer works in a dense grove in the war zone of Donbas near the village of Novoluhanske on April 30, 2021. (Volodymyr Petrov)
