Ukraine is now routinely described as the most mine-contaminated country on Earth, and the problem is getting worse. Drone-delivered munitions — used by both sides — are spreading contamination far beyond traditional front lines, producing what the UN's mine action programme manager Paul Heslop calls a scale not seen since American cluster munitions carpeted the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The comparison is not rhetorical. It is operational. The technology to address this is evolving fast. The DMR-7, a remote-controlled tank-like vehicle that uses compressed air to excavate suspected mine sites, reduces a 45-minute manual dig to five minutes. AI-powered image analysis, ground-penetrating radar, explosive-detecting sensors, and drone surveillance have replaced binoculars and paper maps for organizations like the Halo Trust. Some $1.5bn in funding has flowed into Ukraine's demining sector since the full-scale invasion began. The raw inputs — money, technology, skilled operators — exist. But the bottleneck is not in the field. It is in Kyiv. Responsibility for demining is fragmented across multiple government agencies with overlapping mandates. A mine action law reform that would align Ukraine with international standards has stalled because, as deputy economy minister Ihor Bezkaravainyi explains, agencies that would lose responsibility interpret that as losing power. One sector insider puts it plainly: "The biggest barrier to demining Ukraine is the government of Ukraine." The regulatory friction is specific and measurable. Health and safety rules prohibit operators from sitting inside clearance vehicles, requiring remote operation that deminers say is significantly slower. The state's classification of contaminated land is overly broad — Heslop argues that occupation by Russian forces is being treated as synonymous with contamination, wasting time and money clearing land that may contain no explosives. "Land is only contaminated if it's got fucking explosives in it," he says. The resource asymmetry between international organizations and the Ukrainian state is stark. The Halo Trust alone spent nearly £50m in Ukraine in the year to March 2025, dwarfing the state's £28.6m annual budget for agricultural land clearance. Dozens of other demining organizations operate with their own approaches and overlapping responsibilities. This fragmentation means no single authority can prioritize, sequence, or accelerate the national effort. Meanwhile, the threat landscape keeps shifting. Russian POM-3 mines — small cylindrical devices detonated by the vibrations of approaching footsteps — have made entire villages no-go zones for deminers. Drone jamming systems used by both militaries interfere with humanitarian drone operations, and the Halo Trust has lost several drones to jamming and spoofing attacks. The technological arms race that created the contamination is now degrading the tools designed to fix it. The fundamental tension is between a war that is industrializing contamination at unprecedented speed and a bureaucratic apparatus that cannot match that pace. The technology exists for what Heslop calls "the biggest pivot in humanitarian mine action in 30 years." Whether Ukraine's institutional architecture allows it to be deployed at scale is the question that will determine how many years — or decades — the country's richest agricultural land remains unusable.
