BESIDE an abandoned Russian military camp in eastern Ukraine, the body of a man is sprawled in the grass – a civilian who had fallen victim to a tripwire land mine set by retreating Russian forces.
Nearby, a group of Ukrainian deminers with the country’s territorial defence forces worked to clear the area of dozens of other deadly mines and unexploded ordnance – a push to restore a semblance of safety to the cities, towns and countryside in a region that spent months under Russian occupation.
The deminers, part of the 113th Kharkiv Defence Brigade of Ukraine’s territorial defence forces, walked deep into fallow agricultural lands along a muddy road between fields of dead sunflowers overgrown with high weeds.
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