Mykola shows us a long stick with a scoop cut out of a plastic bottle tied to it. Villagers usually use these to pick apples from the upper branches, but in Kamianka, they are used to pick “butterfly” mines from gardens. There are more of those than apples, more than houses, and more than the people here.
Using a bottle, Mykola picks up a mine hidden in his garden and carries it away from his home. He slowly puts the collected “butterflies” together.
“You need to put a cloth over them. It’s better when it’s a long cloth. You can set the edge of the cloth on fire and then run to a safe distance,” a skinny pensioner explains to us his own demining method. Even the word “safe” in his story is pure irony. This method should never be repeated. But people in Kamianka started doing this not for the sake of adventure, but rather out of desperation. They want to work on their land as soon as possible.
The village is being cleared by SES rescuers and the international mine action organization FSD. But in this exhausting struggle, mines still win over people. Local villagers are blown up almost every month. If they manage to survive, they might remain crippled.
Despite all warnings, civilians go and clear their properties themselves. Ukrainians have already won this land from Russians once. Now they are winning it from the shells and mines left by the occupiers.
The gateway to Donbas
Kamianka can be seen when traveling along the road from the Kharkiv Oblast to the Donetsk Oblast, passing Izium and brown fields with charred russian tanks by the side of the road. There is not a single building in Kamianka left intact. Looking through the window over the hills, one can see endless skeletons of walls and roofs. Walking along the main road in the village itself, one steps on the remaining islands of asphalt. Red ammunition still lies here and there.
A series of red-and-white stakes and a metal rope stretched between them divides the village into two parts, like a road. Behind the rope, there are houses, gardens, and daisy blossoms—someone’s life—and mines.
Mines. Mines. Mines. Red danger triangles are dug in front of each house. Unexploded shells, tripwires, “butterflies,” and God knows what other things were left behind after the fighting and occupation.
Before the war, approximately 1,200 people lived in Kamianka. Most of them left the village through forests and went to Sloviansk before the Russian tanks came. A few dozen villagers stayed. Not all of them lived until the liberation. The bodies of the victims lay in the basements of houses, some for as long as six months.
“They called our village the gateway to Donbas. Because we are between Kharkiv and Donetsk Oblasts. The village used to be rich: nice land, fertile black soil. We lived in abundance, not like Russian villages. Russians wanted to capture us in 2014, too, but they couldn’t get through then, and during this war they completely destroyed the village,” says Tetiana Lukiyenko, 64.
She fled Kamianka a day before the Russians occupied the village. The pensioner walked through the forest and then took a boat across the river to catch a train to Poltava Oblast. Leaving the village, she saw houses engulfed in flames, set ablaze by Russian shelling.
When Kamianka was liberated, Tetiana returned only to find craters and ashes. “My house was gone; in its place, there was a crater with rainwater and frogs croaking.”
Tetiana mourned more for her animals, not for her house.
“When the Russian army entered the village, they shot all dogs straightaway. They ate all the chickens. And I still don’t know what happened to my cow. We only found animal bones in the gardens. I cried so much for her, my black-and-white Mania,” Tetiana wipes away her tears with palms made rough from work and bends to hug a black cat named Liova. Liova showed up and made himself at home a few months ago and has been following Tetiana everywhere ever since. The only joy and consolation Tetiana has at the moment are Liova and her piece of land—her garden.
A white trailer stands where her house once stood—she lives there now. Humanitarian organizations have installed a few of these modular houses in Kamianka. They installed gas and electricity and put small stoves inside the houses—both for heating and cooking. Clothes, dishes, furniture—everything was brought by volunteers. Tetiana says she has only two cups of her own. Two large cups with red flowers painted on them. She drinks her evening tea from them.
“These two cups and the soil in the garden are all that I have here from the pre-war period.”
But the soil is now dotted with “butterflies.” In early summer, when Tetiana was digging tomato beds, she came across a cassette of 36 PFM-1 mines.
“At first, I thought about what was shining so beautifully. But then I understood and was so scared. I called the rescuers. They blew up the cassette. It was so loud.”
Tetiana got away with a scare and a hole in the garden. Not everyone is so lucky.
They won’t return soon
More than a thousand Ukrainians have suffered from mine or shell explosions since the beginning of the full-scale war. Around three hundred people have died. According to the Security Service of Ukraine, Russians left the most mine traps for citizens in Kharkiv and Donetsk Oblasts. Mine traps are fragmentation anti-personnel landmines PFM-1, one of which Tetiana found when preparing to plant tomatoes. This mine can hardly be seen on the ground, and when it explodes, it injures the legs so badly it can be lethal, according to an agency that explained how these “butterflies” work.
If you ask 16-year-old, brown-eyed Yaroslav Biliavtsev about these mines, he will simply lift his right leg, which lacks a foot.
“It was a “butterfly” or something like that. I stepped on it in Kamianka. A loud explosion. My foot was torn away. My sneaker flew into the air,” Yaroslav speaks barely audibly, because that day still pains him. You can hardly notice this mine in the grass, but the boy still wonders whether he could have somehow avoided it.
On that day, he came to Kamianka with his father to clear the rubble that was had been their home. As Yaroslav was approaching the village, his cane fell off his scooter. He stopped, took a step to the side of the road, and then there was pain and shock. The boy’s father, Oleksiy, has been fighting in the east of Ukraine since 2014, he always has a first aid kit and a tourniquet with him, and he knows how to use them. Dad’s war habit saved his son.
“In the village, the cell phone coverage is not good, and I wouldn’t even be able to call an ambulance if I were traveling alone. Dad saved my life,” says the teenager, wrapping an elastic bandage and putting soft pads on his leg before fitting his prosthetic foot.
His wounds healed, and in six months, Yaroslav was able to stand on his prosthesis, started walking again and even returned to driving his motorcycle. But after that day, his family decided they wouldn’t be returning to Kamianka, and now they live in Izium.
“The village is like a minefield now. People are constantly being blown up there. Recently, even a sapper was blown up. So, we won’t be able to return there for a long time yet,” says Yaroslav’s father.
A nice place to live. A nice place to fight
Most people who stayed in Kamianka were those who didn’t have the energy or possibility to start a new life. This summer, 68 people live there—mostly pensioners. For more than a year, the village and the surrounding land have been cleared for them.
“A large number of people left Kamianka, many disappeared, but there are those who want to return home. These people are our priority. They provide us with information on the areas they want to use. We try to help them,” says Yurii Sereda, project management specialist at the Swiss Foundation for Humanitarian Demining (FSD). In his Kharkiv office, there is a map of Kamianka divided into “polygons”—that’s how deminers call parts of the village marked by them for clearance.
Yuriy doesn’t dare guess how long their work in Kamianka will last. The area is regarded as difficult even by his foreign colleagues, who dealt with demining in the Balkans, Syria, and Libya. Before demining, FSD surveyed the area with quadcopters, and interviewed the military and residents. At every stage, they received the same feedback—the area is full of explosive ammunition.
“Fields, yards, gardens, and even village roads are dangerous. The village saw highly intensive fighting with a lot of cluster munitions—those that explode at once, and those that stay and wait for their victims. It is a very nice place to live—here, in the lowlands, the nature is beautiful. But, as it turned out, this is also a good military position. So that’s how the history of Kamianka was written,” says Yurii, as he shows us models of the butterfly mine on his desk—those that pose the greatest threat to the villagers of Kamianka. A small dark-green PMF-1 weighs just eighty grams, has a plastic body, and easily fits into the palm of your hand.
It can be said that no one should live in Kamianka. But Tetiana or Mykola do not have another home.
“We do not have any belongings left, but we do have good land: we planted potatoes, vegetables, and melon fields again. That’s how we live,” says Mykola. He sits in his modular house on a mattress placed on wooden boxes where shells used to be stored.
When harvest time approaches, the anticipation of demining becomes especially acute. Despite the red signs dug straight next to their homes, people take out shovels and go to work on the land. After all, this land is not just mines, but also what feeds people—their roots, their hope for the future, and their understanding of themselves in this world.
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When the war in Ukraine is over, all territories are deoccupied, cities are liberated and the borders are restored, fighting will still leave its dangerous trace—mines. No country in the world has ever had to deal with anything like that. As of today, 40% of Ukrainian territories are mined.
This material—a part of project “The Most Mined Country in the World”—is intended to show that there are tragic and heroic human stories behind the mines issue.
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Translation — Olha Dubnevych
Copy Editing — Jared Goyette
[The translation of this publication was compiled with the support of the European Union and the International Renaissance Foundation within the framework “European Renaissance of Ukraine” project. Its content is the exclusive responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union and the International Renaissance Foundation]
