This is a war story that is literally as old as war stories.
When Abimelech was told that Shechem was preparing for the harvest, he divided his men into three companies then went into the fields to wait. When the people came out of their walled city, his men rose against the people of Shechem and killed them. Abimelech and the men who were with him rushed forward and blocked the entrance to the city, while the other two companies chased those who were in the fields and killed them. At the end of the fight, Abimelech marched into Shechem, killed the people who remained, burned the city, broke down its walls, and spread the ruins with salt. — Judges 9, 42-45
Stories in which one side in a war attempts to not just capture a town or territory, but to make that territory utterly uninhabitable, go back so far that the first are recorded on clay tablets. The Assyrian king Adadnirari I destroyed the city of Taidu and covered it with “kudimmu” which appears to have been some kind of poison. The great conqueror king Tiglath-Pileser I bragged about covering the fields of Hunusa with something called sipu-stones. I’ve no idea what those are, but it appears to have been bad.
The oldest of all these stories may be a record of the proto-Hittite ruler Anitta who, sometime around 1700 BCE, destroyed the city of Hattusa and spread the seeds of tough, hard to eradicate weeds across their fields (Hittite biowarfare. Who knew?). Meanwhile, the most famous incident is certainly when Scipio Aemilianus, at the end of Rome’s last war with Carthage in the middle of the second century BCE, not only burned the city, but had the fields around it plowed with salt to ruin their fertility.
These days, militaries don’t settle for just ruining an area for future habitation. They also want to make it impossible for the enemy to camp there, or even pass through. Which is why much of Ukraine is now plagued by something that seems almost as old as salting the earth — mines.
When people think about mines, their mind usually turns either to big metal globes, covered in bumps, floating just beneath the surface of the sea, or to plate-sized containers of high explosives planted in the ground, where they can be sniffed out by the world’s cutest bomb detector.
When it comes to the fields, mines are definitely affecting Ukrainian farmers. Earlier this week, Euromaidan Press reported on Russia’s “war on farms” that has farmers dealing with damaged or destroyed homes and barns, fields filled with blast craters, bomb fragments, and the all too common unexploded artillery shell. But many of those fields are also spread with mines. Despite Patron and his human handlers, and thousands of other Ukrainians now engaged full time in mine removal, several farmers have already been injured, and some have died, when their farm equipment encountered mines left behind by Russian invaders.
Mines are, and have been for centuries, one of the most effective, and most insidious, weapons of war. so much so that there are an estimated 80 million landmines from past wars still buried in battlefields around the world. Many of these have been there for decades, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still waiting to take the lives of a farmer, or a curious child.
When it comes to why things in Ukraine often seem to be moving slowly, and why much of the original frontline between Ukraine and the areas that Russia occupied in 2014 is still intact, the answer isn’t so much that the two sides are locked in artillery duels that neither can break. It’s that the land between them is so tightly packed with mines — mines planted by both sides, often without anyone noting the position of these mines — that no one and nothing can cross the ground safely. When someone describes a position in Ukraine as “fortified,” they don’t generally mean it has towering stone walls, or reinforced concrete bunkers. They mean that is it absolutely surrounded in a mass of explosives that are more dangerous than all the bullets and shells flying through the air.
Both Ukraine and Russia have used land mines extensively in the Donbas, and around Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, and Kyiv. Many of these are devices similar to the Russian TM-62M land mine, which packs high explosives into a plastic case. These are purposely “low metal” mines, meaning that they are very difficult to detect using the usual sensors deployed for finding old mines. They can be scattered on the surface, buried in soil, placed in debris, or rigged as booby traps. There are currently hundreds of thousands of these mines deployed in Ukraine, and removing them from areas no longer thought to be under immediate threat is full time employment for a not-so-small army of Ukrainians.
But these aren’t the only things that make taking a walk across a Ukrainian field, or a stroll down a street, far more deadly than anyone might expect. New forms of mines, some of which were invented in the last year, have been deployed.
Some of these are variants on directional mines, like the sixty year old Claymore. But where the original directional mines were anti-personnel devices triggered by someone walking into a tripwire, some of the new mines of this class are so-called “off route mines” that are capable of firing anti-tank weapons guided by fiber optic or infrared sensors. A good example of these are the German DM-22 mines.
Videos of what might seem to be someone striking from the woods with a man-carried antitank weapon, might easily be a device in this class.
Here’s a video on the DM-22 that shows how it works and how effective it can be.
So, Ukrainian roads and fields are filled with spots where any pressure can generate an explosion strong enough to rupture the belly plate of a tank, and Ukrainian forests are crisscrossed by all-but-invisible lines that can unleash either sprays of anti-personnel shot or an armor-piercing missile. These are exceptionally good reasons to slow any potential advance.
But wait! There’s more! Antipersonnel weapons like the Russian POM-2 mine are still being scattered around by the thousands. Russia is also using these mines to create traps, including by carefully placing them under the bodies of fallen Ukrainian soldiers or civilians, so that when forces come out to retrieve those bodies, the mine explodes. That’s a war crime, by the way. One that Russia has already been guilty of hundreds of times (at least) in this war.
Everything we’ve talked about up until now (except for the war crime booby traps) is a form of “protective minefield.” That’s a minefield laid in an area that’s not currently occupied by the enemy, and which is created with the hopes of keeping them out. Grisly as it is, illegal as many would like them to be, these mines are often regarded as “defensive weapons.” Don’t step into our forest, and you won’t touch any of our highly sensitive fiber optic lines that are going to direct a festival of explosive missiles your way. Okay?
There’s another kind. Those are called “interdiction minefields.” They’re “laid” in areas where the enemy is already present. Laid is in quotes up there because these mines are often deployed either by dropping them from aircraft or by launching them into the area using a multi-launch rocket system. That’s right, an MLRS doesn’t always bring the gift of an immediate explosion. It can also open up like the military’s most twisted version of a piñata, spreading the area with small explosive devices.
Russia has systems for this that can be fired from the BM-21 GRAD, its replacement the Tornado-G, from the BM-27 Uragan, and from the TOS-1 thermobaric launcher. Such mines can also be sent using a ballistic missile and even more varieties that can be dropped from aircraft. No matter how they arrive, these are all examples of the “cluster munitions” responsible for so many civilian casualties in modern wars.
America, it should be noted, also has mines that can be deployed by aircraft or launched by MLRS. But for bonus points, Russia has been known to deploy weapons of this type that are extra colorful, or even shaped like toys, to encourage kids to pick them up. If you guessed “that’s a war crime,” you win again.
Not only does Russia have these systems, they are using them. That’s especially true when it comes to areas that have been taken and retaken many times. Towns and villages like Dolyna and Dibrovne south of Izyum have been practically hosed down with volleys of these things, leaving them a nightmare for forces moving in either direction. Something similar seems to have happened with the town of Pisky, along the front lines in Donetsk oblast. Russia has been fighting to take Pisky for weeks, and reports are that Ukraine pulled out of there days ago. However, Russia doesn’t seem to have moved in. That reluctance appears to be, at least in part, because Pisky is now hosting every member of the mine family, including lots of the MLRS-deployed mines that Russia sent toward the former site of Ukrainian forces. They have Pisky … if they can figure out how to survive taking ownership.
Why are some areas along the front line so incredibly stable? Mines. Why are most advances by either Ukraine or Russia so slow even when it seems like they have an opportunity to break into the enemy backfield and run for the end zone? Mines. Why are some villages not just “in dispute” but essentially unoccupied after they were fought over for weeks? Mines.
They don’t get much talked about. They’re not at all “sexy” when compared to tanks, or drones, or missiles, or long range artillery. But mines are doing a lot to shape the battlefield in Ukraine. Because they are almost always there, and anyone who forgets this for too long, will get a reminder.
Russia is salting the earth in Ukraine, and getting that land back is one helluva a dangerous job.
Sunday, Sep 4, 2022 · 3:01:19 PM +00:00 · kos
First official liberation from Kherson offensive:
Ukraine doesn’t make such announcements unless a town is completely safe from Russian counterattacks. This means the front has likely moved significantly south of here.
This village is at the tippy-top northern edge of the Kherson oblast front, and is significant because Russia had heavily fortified it. They intended to hold territory at the oblast’s borders in order to stage their Kherson “referendum.”
Sunday, Sep 4, 2022 · 3:38:06 PM +00:00 · kos
Holy shit.
That’s north of Ozerne, see map above. If this is happening, and it’s not at all confirmed in any real way, it could only happen if the area is literally empty of Russians. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Ukraine retreats in the face of any Russian response, since this is not easy-to-support (logistically) for Ukraine.
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