War may end, but not for sappers: daily life clearing mines

The tall, thick green grass reaches my knees. I try to keep up with the group of sappers and the cameraman in front of me. We walk along a narrow path, and then a small slope opens up in front of us, behind which there are houses.

"Be careful - watch your feet and don't step into the grass," one of the sappers tells us.

"The Russians withdrew and left the entire bottom of the ravine mined, there are a lot of corpses in this grass," another SES worker adds.

We are 50 kilometers from Russia’s Belgorod Oblast. The de-occupied Kharkiv Oblast is considered one of the most heavily mined regions of Ukraine. Since September 2022, when the Ukrainian Armed Forces liberated the region, sappers have been working every day to clear the land of mines. Over the past year, they received about 22,000 applications from civilians: at the end of 2022, 1,500 remained unprocessed, and the rest were closed.

"There are not so many applications now, but there is still enough work. More and more people are returning to their homes. We can arrive at a person's house on request, and three other houses will come and say that they also have something in their yard. So we can get stuck in one place for a long time," says Maksym, a sapper.

"It all depends on the imagination of the miner"

In total, there are about 35 sapper teams in Kharkiv Oblast. Some of them deal only with infrastructure facilities so that utility companies can restore electricity faster. There are groups that also cover requests from civilians. It is with such a team of six people that we have been working for two days.

"I've been here before, but only as far as the fence, I was afraid to go further," says local resident Tetiana as we approach her house. "There's no house there (gestures - ed.), it was bombed. All that's left is the apiary, and I plan to continue working there."

Two sappers go to inspect the area.

"Can you also inspect my house? They lived on our street, and I'm afraid to enter my property," a local approaches the other sappers.

A man uses a crowbar to open the door to his house. He is here for the first time since the beginning of the full-scale war. First, a sapper enters the house. He looks around carefully and carefully picks up the scattered things. The Russians have traditionally left a mess behind.

"What should you look for first when you enter a house like this?" I ask the rescue worker who is coming out of the house.

"You have to watch everything, especially your feet. They (Russians - ed.) can put tripwires anywhere. It depends on the miner's imagination," the sapper replies.

"All clear here," the guys shout from behind the house, "no one has touched the beehives.”

"Fear is our assistant"

For the guys, the first mission during the full-scale war took place at 7 am. After arriving in Kharkiv.

"We had already met Russians in Tsyrkuny (a village north of Kharkiv - ed.). They blocked the road. We drove up, they told us to turn around. At first we did not realize that they were Russians. We thought they were our lot. The head of the group told the driver to drive around them carefully and keep driving. The driver accelerated, and an unknown man reloaded his machine gun and pointed it at us," says Andriy, a sapper.

"Did he shoot or not?" I ask the guys.

"No, back then they just turned everyone around. The boss said: ‘Let us through, we need to help people’. And I look at the chevron of the man with the machine gun and see what it says: ‘RUSSIA’. I whispered to the chief: ‘These are Russians’. And then he said to him: ‘Let us through, we need to help people’," Maksym continues the story.

The Russians then said that they would count to three and if the sappers did not turn around, they would open fire on them. The group commander kept asking them to let them through, but after the count of two, the guys realized that the Russians were not joking.

After that incident, the sappers say, they came under mortar fire more than once when they went on work calls. Once even with journalists.

"As usual, we were working through applications, driving through the town, and suddenly came under fire from Grad. It exploded everywhere: in front, to the side, behind, but we got out unharmed," says Maksym.

"I'm scared today, yesterday, and from day one. But such fear is our assistant, because when it disappears, you become reckless, which means you should change jobs," he adds a little later.

"Traps for miners"

We are entering another village. The sappers say that we have to be more vigilant - the Russians have left a lot of anti-personnel landmines "petals" here.

The rescuers go to a house where a local is waiting for them. There is a parachute in the garden behind him. The man doesn't know how it got there: it was probably left behind by the Russians, and he doesn't know what's underneath it.

Bohdan, the head of the sapper team, takes out a rope with a hook and tells everyone to go behind the house. His colleague Sashko goes with the rope to the parachute, carefully hooks it and joins the others at a safe distance.

The sappers pull on the rope and say that we have to wait a while. There have been numerous cases when the explosives have gone off only after some time.

"Once, another group's explosives went off an hour and a half after they were 'pulled' with a sapper's hook. One sapper died on the spot, another was wounded. No one knows why it went off after so long. They are setting traps for us," says Andriy.

When the town of Balakliya was liberated, Maksym says, their colleagues found a Russian manual on non-standard mining: "Not all of our metal detectors can recognize a mine, because some of them are plastic. In addition, Russians often do complex mining: they bury the first mines, then put another one on top, take a PVC pipe, connect explosives to it and bury it again. A bar is placed on the pipe. A car runs over it, it adds force to the whole thing, and a powerful explosion occurs. This is almost 18 kilograms of TNT. There is no chance to survive after that."  

"Don't you get scared after hearing such stories?" I ask.

"Not really. We are a family, we are always together. Deep down we are worried, but no one shows it. We try not to get emotionally attached to each other," Maksym explains.

Before, few people joined the SES. During the war, Andriy says, the number of people willing to work in the structure increased: "The senior often asks new employees: ‘Are you ready to have a school named after you? If so, undergo an interview and a psychological assessment, and you can start working.’ Many people refuse, because it is a risk to their lives, because we have already had explosions." 

A few minutes later we come out from behind the house. The explosives did not detonate. The sappers take the parachute with an unknown object back to their offices. Andriy says that now it is necessary to continue clearing the area quickly, because during the counteroffensive, the SES workers will also have to move further.

"We have to do most of the work here. Some will stay and some will leave. The war may end, but not for us," says Andriy.

Courtesy of the Russian Language News Exchange.