KIEV – The memory of an invasion is in the washing machine drum, in the tool cabinet, on the bark of the tree in the garden. The memory of an invasion explodes and kills you if you are not attentive to yourself. Anti-personnel mines, grenades, explosive cans full of nails, an infinity of unexploded bullets. The withdrawal of the Russians from the Kiev and Chernihiv regions left behind a labyrinth of deadly traps.
The Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior is releasing photographs of some of these finds. They are the testimony of a senseless perfidy, a cowardly desire to kill by hiding the hand, and to kill anyone, whoever touches it, soldier or child, grandfather or mother of a family.
Here are the bombs hanging from a tree, there is a taut wire that makes them detonate if you don’t notice it. A grenade hidden inside a plastic box. The cars abandoned before the escape, explain the agents who are slowly clearing the cities that have been occupied meter by meter, are another constant danger: the bombs have been placed in such a way as to explode when the owner, returned home, tries to see in what condition they are.
The ministry released a video of the de-mining of a large mine hidden in a package. The perverse fantasy of those who want to kill an alleged unknown enemy after days, months and even years, has no limits. The Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly repeated that they have found bombs even on bodies, to surprise the rescuers by killing them too.
War Russia-Ukraine, the timeline of the conflict
curated by Flavio Bini and Paola Cipriani
The deminers are at work with teams that patrol the abandoned cities, and follow a precise order: they check the streets, then the private properties but only those in which the owner is present. They cannot enter abandoned houses, which is why threats remain everywhere in these gutted cities where houses no longer have walls or walls, often, and anyone can put a foot where they shouldn’t just to see if the missing neighbors have died in the basement. .
It will take at least a year, the authorities warn, to clear the bulk of the occupied areas. It is another of the horrors of this war that will be difficult to forget, because there are not only the streets and houses to check but entire fields, not only those widely mined but also those in which a single treacherous device has been left, ready to kill the farmer who will return to work the land. It is already happening: the latest case is yesterday, a tractor ended up with the wheel on an anti-tank mine placed on agricultural land, another civilian killed for no reason.