Ukraine’s mine-ridden ghost villages are being reclaimed - but it's the deadliest job in the world

26 February 2025, 19:07 | Updated: 27 February 2025, 16:31

It’s minus 14 degrees, a sunny February day and - words I never thought I’d ever write - I’m walking through a live minefield in the most mined country in the world.

There is complete silence apart from the cooing of a woodpigeon, and the bleep of a metal detector wielded by a brave female deminer called Svetlana who, in another life, before war came to Ukraine, was a manicurist.

The day before I was in Kyiv - it was February 24 and marks the third anniversary of the war. I’d met - with my brother, Boris - a group of soldiers. I asked them who had been injured by landmines or knew someone who had.

A forest of arms went up.

Rachel Johnson landmine visit in Ukraine

I spoke to a doctor called Ana, whose first casualty was in 2022. A boy, she told me.

A 16-year-old who was out foraging for mushrooms in a wood to sell so his family could buy food. His leg was blown off.

“I’m now on the frontline and we have a lot of casualties,” she went on.

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"Russian soldiers used to plant them by hand, but now they drop them by drone. A place that was safe to walk only half an hour before is now full of landmines. It’s very dangerous.”

I met a soldier, Sergiy, who lost his leg after stepping on a mine in Bakhmut, in the Donetsk oblast, back in 2023.

Sergiy- who is still in uniform - told me the enemy (as he termed the Russians) plant mines in clusters, to cause additional injuries, so that you can often lose an arm too when you fall.

“Usually they put many of them close to each other,” he said.

“Whole fields are covered.”

When I said they were illegal, he laughed.

“Many things are illegal that happen here, you cannot imagine.”

One very high estimate says up to 40 per cent of the land mass of Ukraine is contaminated, which makes me wonder how on earth President Trump will get to all those precious metals he wants to get his hands on below ground.

In the minefield I’m in, the area of demining, called a polygon, is marked out with colour coded sticks.

The red signs, with a white skull and crossbones warning of death on approach, remind me that the people I’m with are doing the deadliest job in the world, day in day out.

But I am only here for one freezing and unforgettable day, and one of the saddest aspects of my visit - I was hosted by HALO trust, in visor and flak jacket, on cleared paths, so in theory no danger to life or limb - is that I’m in the middle of a village.

When Princess Diana did her historic landmine walk in Angola in 1997, in white shirt and chinos, you see, it was through tall waving green grasses in open country.

And now, we are picking our way gingerly between little dachas and once tended, now overgrown gardens.

Her landmine walk - and adoption of the cause - for a time sent international awareness of the random, senseless lethality of these cruel weapons into the stratosphere. A 1997 treaty banning anti-personnel landmines came into force in 1999 and has been signed by 160 countries but not, of course, by Russia (nor the US, China, and India).

This treaty reflects widespread repugnance for these hidden weapons - which Diana called a “plague on the Earth” that continue to kill and maim long after the final whistle of war.

I cannot think of a worthier cause.

This land - no land - can be made safe for habitation and future generations unless these devices are found and removed before the cause further harm to civilians.

This is why HALO is here in force in the ghost village I’ve visited today.

Bervytsia in Brovary district, Kyiv oblast is only an hour from the capital. It was captured by the forces of the Russian Federation as they tried - and failed - to take Kyiv at the beginning of the campaign that was supposed to last three days but has just entered its fourth year.

The invaders did, however, occupy this quiet rural hamlet and turned the village club - the largest building in the community - into the administrative command post.

For an intense month Berytsia was on the front line, repeatedly shelled as Ukraine’s soldiers tried to retake the village. On 14 March 2022, artillery air strikes destroyed enemy vehicles, kicking out many thousands of metal fragments as well as unexploded ammunition into the gardens and surrounding fields.

Until HALO - who has 1500 personnel in Ukraine - started its inch-by-inch survey of the ground and extraction and removal of the devices, nowhere was safe.

HALO is harnessing tech rapidly. The organisation is sending drones up to take high res images and scanning the area for tell-tale signs of trip wires, IEDs, and can even use satellites and algorithms to detect patterns of mine presence.

After an area is liberated from occupation, a process begins.

First sappers. Then the State Emergency Service comes in immediately to demine the infrastructure, roads, bridges, power supply, etc.

“But there’s always some left,” explains Efion Foster, a former marine, who now commands a team at HALO.

“So then comes the humanitarian job, that goes inch by inch to clear the ground to a depth of 15cm.”

The training is intense and the protocols around safety ferocious. Still, it’s dangerous work.

I asked if HALO had lost personnel, and he said they had. But only one so far. In September 2023 in Kherson, HALO lost Vlad.

I’m allowed to drive a Robocut T800, a remote controlled tank and lawnmower combined that clears vegetation that can hide a device before the deminers do their fingertip work. It’s like driving the biggest Tonka toy ever made.

But mainly I try not to get in the way and watch as HALO personnel sweep the ground with metal detectors, then brush the area gently, to see how far deep any metal is.

I imagine something exploding at any moment but only calmness prevails in the quiet abandoned village, frozen in time by landmines that could take years, even decades, to clear.

The desire to return to normal life here is as strong as the Ukrainian people are brave.

The temperature has risen to a mild minus nine as I take off my PPE and prepare to leave the HALO teams to their essential, live-saving work of prepping the land for peace.

It’s only as I say goodbye that I noticed Svetlana’s perfect nails as she sweeps the metal detector over the Putin-poisoned land are purple-painted and defiantly sparkly.