Demining organisations in Ukraine are adopting drones, artificial intelligence and new mechanical tools to clear land faster and safer, as the widespread use of drone-delivered munitions expands the scale of contamination.
In a field in the Kharkiv region, 58-year-old Olena Kabanova, a deminer with the Halo Trust, crouches on her hands and knees, digging out a neat square around a spot where a mine detector has sensed a suspicious object. Four years ago, this field was occupied by Russian soldiers. Now back under Ukrainian control, it is littered with landmines, and civilians such as Kabanova are trying to make the land usable again.
Drone-delivered munitions widen contamination
Landmines leave land unusable for years after a conflict ends, and removing them is expensive and dangerous. The use of long-range drones in Ukraine, often described as the most mine-contaminated country in the world, is increasing the scale of the problem.
“What we’re now seeing is the massive increase in the use of drone-delivered munitions,” says Paul Heslop, the programme manager for mine action at the United Nations Development Programme in Ukraine. “What already was a very high-intensity battle area is now potentially, through the use of drones on both sides, becoming a much wider area of contamination and a scale that we haven’t seen since the Americans were dropping cluster munitions on the Ho Chi Minh trail.”
Drone and missile attacks make working outdoors unsafe, and humanitarian workers are sometimes directly targeted. Newer, deadlier threats include the POM-3, a small cylindrical mine used by Russian forces that could be mistaken for an abandoned vacuum flask. It is detonated by the vibrations of approaching footsteps.
POM-3 mines mean there are “specific villages that we just completely avoid”, says Anda Riza, a unit commander of the Halo Trust, the largest international humanitarian demining organisation in Ukraine, which employs Kabanova. The types of landmines are “constantly developing and evolving”, says Valeriia Shumska, Riza’s colleague.
New technology speeds up clearance
Technological innovation emerging from the conflict is helping deminers find quicker and safer ways of working than the traditional hands-and-knees approach. The advances are supported by the $1.5bn funding that has poured into Ukraine’s demining sector since the start of the full-scale invasion.
Digging out a patch of land can take up to 45 minutes, but a new machine called the DMR-7 can do it in five. It is a small, tank-like vehicle fitted with a hosepipe that shoots out jet flows of compressed air. Operated remotely by a human standing at a safe distance, the DMR-7 uses compressed air to blast away a small patch of soil. It is a bulky, expensive alternative to a shovel, but one that deminers hope can make one of the most dangerous parts of the process quicker and safer.
The DMR-7 is one of a host of new tools the Halo Trust is experimenting with in Ukraine. Other technologies include AI-powered image analysis, ground-penetrating radar and devices that can detect explosive material, not just metal. Before 2022, much of Halo’s surveillance work was done with binoculars and maps; now it uses drones and satellite imagery, analysed with the help of AI.
Uneven adoption and bureaucratic hurdles
War has also led to innovations in anti-drone technology. Drone jamming systems, used by both Russian and Ukrainian forces, can interfere with humanitarian work, and Halo has lost several drones to jamming and spoofing attacks.
The advances are not spread equally between providers. In a field adjacent to one where Kabanova is working, staff from the state emergency services are also clearing mines. Mykyta Shulzhenko, the head of the mechanised demining unit, says his colleagues have started using drones for surveillance but are not yet able to use AI to analyse the drone-captured imagery. “I really hope this kind of technology will be implemented soon in our work,” he says.
The Halo Trust alone spent nearly £50m in Ukraine in the year to 31 March 2025, dwarfing the state’s annual budget of £28.6m for a programme to clear agricultural land of mines and unexploded ordnance. Dozens of other demining organisations have overlapping responsibilities and approaches, and responsibility for the sector is split across multiple government agencies. Attempts to reform the country’s mine action law to bring it in line with international standards have faltered.
Ihor Bezkaravainyi, a deputy economy minister who leads the country’s work on demining, wants to streamline the policymaking process to create one cabinet-level office to oversee the whole sector, but progress has been slow. Asked why, he offers a weary shrug: “Because, people.” He says: “When we’re talking about a new law, it will mean that some government bodies will lose responsibility, and, they think, power.” One person who has worked in Ukraine’s demining sector puts it more bluntly: “The biggest barrier to demining Ukraine is the government of Ukraine.”
Bezkaravainyi says: “When we’re talking about an ordinary situation with mine action … the conflict has ended, and the government does not exist … in Ukraine, it’s the opposite situation.” That leads to regulatory and bureaucratic barriers. For example, deminers are often prevented from using vehicles driven directly by a person, with health and safety standards requiring that vehicles are operated remotely. Riza says: “We know for a fact that doing it remotely is much slower than having a person in the cab. That continues to be our biggest challenge.”
Heslop argues that the Ukrainian authorities are overly broad in their categorisation of land as being contaminated by mines, an approach that risks wasting time and money on clearing land that wasn’t dangerous in the first place. “Just because it was occupied by the Russians doesn’t necessarily mean it was contaminated,” he says. “Land is only contaminated if it’s got fucking explosives in it.”
Despite these challenges, deminers across the sector agree that technological advances will accelerate their ability to release Ukraine’s richly fertile land for civilian use at a much faster rate than has been possible in the past. “This is the cutting edge of technology,” says Heslop. “This is where the humanitarian mine action sector is going through the biggest pivot in the last 30 years.”
