Military briefing: the mines stalling Ukraine’s advance

Dmytro was marching through shrubbery at the front line east of the town of Lyman when his Ukrainian assault unit came under fire from Russian lines. He stepped aside to dodge the bullets. Then came the explosion. 

Dmytro had triggered an anti-personnel mine. The blast dislocated his hips, fractured his pelvis, buried shrapnel deep in his left leg and nearly tore off his left ankle.

“We got him here just in time,” said doctor Viktor Stercheus, a doctor with the MOAS aid organisation, after riding with Dmytro and the Financial Times over rocket-cratered roads to Kramatorsk hospital. “He now has a 90 per cent chance of surviving and keeping his leg.” 

Hundreds more treated by Stercheus and his colleagues have not been as fortunate. Six weeks into Ukraine’s counteroffensive to reclaim its eastern and southern regions from Russian occupiers, no military obstacle appears as daunting as Russia’s vast and dense minefields, which are destroying Nato-supplied armour, wounding soldiers and zapping morale. 

“We can push with 10 brigades but it won’t work because the mines are everywhere, every half a meter there are mines,” said Sultan, a commander in the 78th regiment, a special forces unit, at a field hospital near the front line in Zaporizhzhia region. “They are everywhere.”

Ukraine’s advance has been painfully slow, and frontline soldiers in southern Zaporizhzhia region and eastern Donetsk region largely blame Russia’s minefields — a hidden threat that has become a psychological torment.

To recapture territory, troops must cross miles of open fields littered with thousands of mines: anti-tank, anti-personnel, improvised explosive devices and an array of booby traps.

Some are launched at random into fields from afar, so-called “distance mining”; others bounce in the air when triggered to spray shrapnel as far as possible. Small green plastic ones that soldiers call “butterfly” mines, a reference to their double-winged shape, are hard to de-mine and especially menacing, troops and doctors said.

Sultan, who preferred to be identified by his call sign, encountered his Russian mine as he sought cover in a thin tree line previously used by Russian soldiers. He pushed a branch out of his way and flicked a tripwire. The blast threw him on his back but the tree took most of the shrapnel. He suffered a concussion — his third — and was evacuated to a frontline hospital.

Russian forces, according to the officer, have noticed the Ukrainians’ tactic of capturing enemy positions and then using them to regroup and launch the next assault. Now booby traps are common.

Western armoured vehicles such as the American-made Bradley fighting vehicles and German Leopard 2 battle tanks have provided some protection. But mine strikes have put many vehicles out of commission, halting advances, and leaving the troops to trek on foot through minefields while under fire.

“These are real people in real machines that are out there really clearing real minefields and they’re really dying,” General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday. “So, when that happens, units tend to slow down and that’s rightly so, in order to survive, in order to get through these minefields.”

A harrowing drone video published by a Ukrainian journalist captured such a situation earlier this month. It showed Ukrainian soldiers in a rocket-cratered field stepping on anti-personnel mines one after the other, as they tried to evacuate a group of badly wounded men with a Bradley vehicle but became casualties themselves. 

The failed assault turned into a rescue operation and lasted about three hours, soldiers with direct knowledge of it said. 

“The mines are channelling the Ukrainian efforts, and they are severely limiting the Ukrainians’ manoeuvre space, which is usually not a great thing when . . . you are attacking,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. 

Russians were employing “basic Soviet doctrine”, he added, drawing parallels with the Red Army laying more than a million mines in 1943 to halt Nazi Germany in the Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history.

Minefields have already forced Ukraine to adapt, according to frontline soldiers. Instead of trying to punch through Russia’s miles-deep minefields and heavily fortified defences with western armour as previously planned, Ukrainian troops are plodding ahead on foot and hoping that artillery has cleared a path.

Ukrainian military leaders have said they needed western allies to provide more mine-clearing equipment, such as M58 Mine Clearing Line Charge systems (MICLICs), some of which the US has provided already but not to the extent that was promised.

Still, Gady said that more demining equipment would not necessarily lead to greater success. “Additional mine-clearing equipment would help, but . . . it would be even tough for well-equipped western militaries such as the US to break through those layered defences.”

Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said that the Russians have “spared no expense in deploying mines” as they prepared defences in the months before Ukraine’s counteroffensive. 

“They deployed a variety and types of mines [and] in ways to specifically negate certain mine trawlers, or systems that Ukraine is using,” he said after a visiting Ukrainian commanders and troops on the front line in Zaporizhzhia region. “They’re mining trenches. They’re using radio- controlled mines and in some very creative ways to create issues [for Ukrainian troops].”

Lee said that soldiers could benefit from anti-personnel obstacle breaching systems, a mobile explosive line charge system used to clear mines from a safe distance. These can fit into a backpack and can be carried on foot, better suiting Ukraine’s new dismounted strategy. 

But it is not just the mines themselves, which Ukraine can in theory break through, said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who visited Ukrainian positions with Lee.

The layered Russian defences — running through several lines of defences and minefields — are often regenerated as the battle progresses; the time it takes for Ukrainian forces to inch forward is time Russia spends bolstering the next line of mines.

“And that’s really the challenge — for Ukrainian forces is not just breaking through the initial line. It is breaking through with enough resources, enough gas in the tank to exploit that breakthrough to actually achieve a strategic objective in this offensive.”

The toll is clear in medical centres. Volodymyr, a medic who works in another military hospital near Bakhmut, said he performs dozens of surgeries daily, most of which are amputations from mine blasts. “Before [the counteroffensive] we mostly treated shrapnel wounds from artillery. Now it is injuries from mines.”