Friday, March 18, 2016

Ukraine’s Landmines: Sowing a Legacy of Death

 
By Sergio Cantone
  • A mine costs around $2 to lay and around $1,000 to remove.
  • Ukraine has more than 5 million devices despite promises to stop using them.
  • No one knows how many lie buried in fields, woods and wasteland in the country’s east
On February 10, Andriy Kostenko, 45, was heading from Luhansk towards the town of Marinka when he found his route blocked by a queue cased by a military checkpoint.

Apparently trying to skip the line, he steered off the road and, moments later, his Volkswagen minivan struck a landmine. Kostenko and two passengers were killed.

Their deaths add to a civilian toll from concealed explosive devices that has already topped 260 in less than two years of conflict between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian rebel groups. A further 479 non-military personal are known to have suffered serious injuries when they ventured unaware into a minefield.

No one knows who planted most of the mines involved. The location of many may never even have been recorded; others have been marked only on rough sketches made by the soldiers who laid them.

Their dissemination, by thousands, marks a serious setback to decades of international efforts to eliminate the indiscriminate killing. Ukraine has joined 10 other nations around the world where anti-personnel mines are still being laid – North Korea, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Colombia, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia and Myanmar. 

Click here for the full article.

Source: Euronews

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