After an exercise, Vitaliy shows some dents on an armored vehicle that this Ukrainian has developed to locate mines and clear land remotely.
The damage is rather limited, despite the power of the explosives: the device has just been tested on five anti-tank mines.
In the Ukrainian regions devastated by the war, the soil is riddled with mines, forcing residents to be inventive to avoid deaths.
Vitaliy, who says he cannot give his last name or occupation, shows his prototype, based on a Hitachi excavator, at a military training ground in southeastern Ukraine. The vehicle can be remotely controlled or driven by a driver.
"Ukraine is so mined that rescue workers are simply scared. It's almost mines upon mines," he explains.
He said he was contacted by the military administration of the city of Kryvyi Rig to prepare the demining of the liberated areas in the Kherson and Kharkiv regions.
By leaving these occupied territories, the Russians left behind mines "which prevent us from launching an effective counter-offensive", regrets the Ukrainian, who financed the project through his company.
The machine, developed with the help of a soldier, has a large protective shield and weighted chains that pound the ground with a force of one ton each, triggering or destroying the mines.
The concept is not new, but Vitaliy hopes the government will choose to support local production to avoid costly imports.
In addition to mines placed by Russian soldiers before their withdrawal, Ukrainian soil also contains bombs and missiles which have not exploded but remain dangerous.
Cleaning up could take years, officials said.
Last week, Vitaliy's homemade vehicle managed to destroy ten anti-personnel mines and five anti-tank mines during tests conducted by military institutes.
The machine only suffered damage that was easily repairable, according to him, particularly to its chains.
During antipersonnel mine tests, a driver was on board. “Of course, there were no volunteers for the anti-tank mines,” says Vitaliy.
The team then used a remote control system.
If authorized by the army, the vehicle could be used for rescue operations but not in combat zones, due to lack of armor, according to Vitaliy.
He thinks that it could, however, be very useful for large spaces, which specialized teams usually take several days to explore.
"Demining is supposed to take place at a speed of 2 km per hour here. The width (of one passage of the machine) is 4.5 meters, that's 9,000 square meters per hour, no one person can clear mines such a surface,” he said.
Denys Nagovitsyn, from the Ukrainian State Emergency Situations Service (DSNS), believes that this type of vehicle "will help" but can only complement human work.
“Machines can neither go everywhere nor see everything,” says this head of a pyrotechnic unit.
“But if you have a large area, like a field, a machine will cover it faster and, in principle, quite well,” he concedes, explaining that his department buys them.
Denys Nagovitsyn knows that his team, which works on foot, is constantly at risk of walking on anti-personnel mines.
“It’s like a lottery,” he says.
Several of his colleagues were killed in the south of the Kherson region. They had found anti-tank mines that appeared to be inactive, but it was a booby trap and the last one exploded.
Public awareness is also a big part of their work.
Residents go looking for firewood, pieces of scrap metal, sometimes even with their children, notes Denys Nagovitsyne, with frustration.
His team sometimes sees farmers working in fields that have not yet been cleared of mines and warns them of the danger – which does not prevent them, sometimes, from seeing their burned tractors afterwards.
Denys Nagovitsyn believes that mine clearance vehicles such as the one developed by Vitaliy could also get bogged down in muddy terrain, due to their weight.
Especially since these vehicles do not always detect so-called “butterfly” mines, which are small, according to him.
A local farmer, Oleksandr Ryabinin, is not convinced either. After the Russian withdrawal, the army and the Ukrainian emergency service cleared its fields.
The machines have "low productivity", he judges, but it is necessary to demine "3,500 hectares of formerly occupied territory".
09/20/2023 05:02:55 - Kryvyï Rig (Ukraine) (AFP) - © 2023 AFP
