13/05/2022 Ucraina (Україна)
“If you ever come across anything suspicious like this item, please do not pick it up, contact your local law enforcement agency for assistance”
It’s spring planting season in Ukraine, but this year farmers require more than fuel and fertiliser –- they also need flak jackets and deminers to destroy the bombs that have already killed or maimed others in their fields. One of the unexploded rockets lay on an island of undisturbed black soil in Igor Tsiapa’s field in the nation’s southwest and posed a deadly threat to getting his corn crop planted on land that was otherwise ploughed and waiting. “We first spotted the projectile a week and a half ago but just didn’t touch this part of the field and continued on getting ready for planting,” he told AFP on Thursday, a few metres from the deminers prepping the device for destruction. “Everything has to be done on schedule if you want to have a more or less proper harvest… We had to keep working,” the nearly 60-year-old added in the area of the village of Grygorivka. Farmers in Ukraine have found themselves on the front line of a Russian invasion that has tainted swathes of the country with undetonated mines, shells and rockets. That’s because they face a unique risk of setting off one of the devices while working the soil, one more piece of worrying news for next year’s harvest in Europe’s breadbasket. Police said the latest injury was in the Kyiv area where a farmer in the village of Gogoliv hit a mine on his tractor while in the fields on Wednesday. Maria Kolesnyk, with analytics firm ProAgro Group, told AFP that about 20 incidents had been recorded of farmers being struck by accidental explosions of war ordnance, but it wasn’t clear how many instances were fatal. “In the agro community today the most sought-after profession is the sappers,” she said. “We desperately need the help of the international community because Ukrainian professionals are working 24/7.” In Tsiapa’s field the rocket was left where it landed, and the blue-helmeted sappers placed orange fist-sized blocks of explosives along its explosive payload before shovelling a mound of dirt over it. “Every day since the start of the war we have been finding and destroying unexploded ammunition,” Dmytro Polishchuk, one of the deminers, told AFP before heading into the field. “After farmers began working in the fields, we started getting regular calls from people alerting us to new devices,” he said, noting the team destroyed up to three per day.
Небрежное обращение с оружием и взрывными устройствами, которые находятся в незаконном обороте, продолжает ежедневно уносить жизни наших граждан», – тогда написал в Facebook замглавы Национальной полиции Украины Вячеслав Аброськин
Dear editors, Biography of a bomb is aimed at highlighting the danger caused by unexploded bombs. Moreover, the most important aspect is that we work completely non profit, raising awerness about this topic is what drives us. We apologize if we make use of pictures in yours articles, but we need them to put a context in how findings are done. We will (and we always do) cite source and author of the picture. We thank you for your comprehension
