With Russians gone from Kyiv region, crews move in to clear deadly booby traps left behind
Interior Ministry estimates demining units have found more than 50,000 pieces of unexploded ordnance so far
When Russian soldiers finally left Yuriy Deshko's trucking company, where they had holed up during their occupation of the town of Hostomel outside Kyiv, two weeks ago, they made sure the Ukrainians cleaning up the mess they left behind found some deadly surprises.
They left a grenade in the cab of a truck, designed to go off when the door was opened. Another was hidden under the seat cushion of a different vehicle, intended to kill whoever sat down to drive. A third was found wedged between the giant wheels of another vehicle.
And wires strung between land mines encircled the compound where Deshko's Transcom Group company had parked dozens of expensive trucks. The Russians had apparently planned to detonate them in case of an attack, but instead, they ended up as lethal devices for Ukrainians to contend with in the aftermath of the occupation.
Booby traps and mines
"There were seven booby traps on this territory," said Deshko, as he walked around the property with a CBC News crew recently.
The company, which leases out tractor-trailers, had several dozen of the huge vehicles on the lot when the Russians invaded in early March, but only about half remain undamaged, Deshko said.
Most of the rest are now blackened and burned hulks — destroyed during the Russian soldiers' time on the property. Deshko estimates the damage at more than $15 million Cdn.
Every vehicle, including the damaged ones, had to be thoroughly checked for booby traps, and members of the local Territorial Defence Force, a volunteer auxiliary branch of the military that includes civilians, were called in to remove them, spending several hours on each truck.
"It's a big job," said Ihor Smorodynov, who heads the detachment that includes the mine clearing unit in nearby Irpin.
"It's not known where the mines are. Everywhere they went, they left mines, and it will take more than a year (to demine).
"It's not only buildings, cars. It's fields, forests — dogs run through the forests and explode on the mine wires."
Unexploded danger
Ukraine's Interior Ministry estimates demining units have found and deactivated more than 50,000 mines and unexploded pieces of ammunition since the beginning of April, when Russian troops pulled out of the areas around Kyiv.
Samantha Power of USAID, which has a disaster response team in Ukraine, said on Twitter this week that about half the country's territory requires demining and that the State Emergency Service is removing 2,000 to 6,000 mines a day.
The Interior Ministry has not released a comprehensive list of people killed or wounded by unexploded devices left behind by Russians but has reported several such incidents.
In the village of Nalyvaikivka, west of Kyiv, a car drove over a mine on a rural road, injuring the driver and her companion, it said.
In another instance, a 46-year-old man was killed by a Russian booby trap on a rural road in the village of Fenevychi.
Also west of Kyiv, a family returned to their home and set off a Russian trip wire, causing injuries to three people, the ministry said.
Outside the northern town of Chernihiv, a farmer plowing his field was killed when his tractor struck an unexploded Russian shell.
"A [general] rule is that a day of war amounts to one month of demining work," said Colonel Ruslan Muzychuk of Ukraine's National Guard, whose sapper teams were sweeping a rural area near Makariv when CBC News visited.
The area saw heavy fighting as Russian forces were pushed back as they attempted to seize the major E40 highway on the way to Kyiv.
The troops had set up a command centre on a rural road feeding into the highway containing large supplies of ammunition. The centre was later ambushed by the Ukrainians and that, in turn, left countless rounds of artillery shells scattered around the area, including mortars, anti-tank rounds and mines.
The sapper teams swept the roads and fields with metal detectors and dropped to their knees to poke the ground when something was detected.
One such contact led to the discovery of an entire box of anti-aircraft ammunition buried in the dirt. The technician dug 30 of the large bullet-like projectiles out of the ground, laying them in a row in front of him.
Hidden hazard
Though stable for now, Muzychuk says that with time, the ammunition could degrade and explode if left where it was found.
"We remember after World War Two, there were a lot of places where people found different bombs [and other] projectiles after decades, and so now we should to make sure that this area is safe," he said.
In another instance, the leader of a crew of sappers — who identified himself as Officer Kryvyi and did not give a first name — spotted an anti-personnel mine with its detonator intact that, he said, could have gone off if someone had stepped on it.
"The war is not as scary as the aftermath of a war," Kryvyi told CBC News. "They (the Russians) didn't care about their ammunition nor their personnel."
In the short time that CBC News spent with the team, the crew recovered dozens of Russian ordnances — artillery shells, grenades and the long projectiles fired out of Grad missile launchers.
In the distance, loud booms rang out as similar stocks of weapons were gathered and safely detonated by another sapper crew.
On Instagram, Ukraine's emergency services posted a video of an explosive device wrapped inside a shopping bag being defused.
At the trucking business outside Kyiv, Yuriy Deshko is still awaiting the green light to open several rooms in the office building on the site.
A team from the Territorial Defence Force had taped a sign on the door of a room for accountants warning people to stay out for fear more tripwires attached to explosives could be inside.
'Not finished yet'
When the managing director's office was swept a few days ago, the team discovered the Russian troops had converted it into a sniper's nest. The person using it had left several days' worth of food rations and even a bottle filled with urine, indicating the sniper was not able to leave his perch.
They also found more wires attached to a detonator to blow up the mines outside.
It will take many more weeks of dangerous work, but Deshko says eventually, the property will be made safe again and business will resume. Still, he expects things will be nothing like they were before the Russians came.
"This hate will stay in the hearts of Ukrainians for a long, long time," he said. "It will be hard to forget what happened and, unfortunately, it's not finished yet."
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