In the weeks during which Russian troops occupied the Husarivka dairy farm, almost all of its 2,500 cattle were killed in artillery fire or for target practice. When the farm was liberated, the carcasses covered the land as far as you could see.
Those that were not blown up or gunned down starved. They were so hungry, they ate each other’s tails. The survivors standing at the trough in one of the farm’s wrecked sheds have stubs where their tails once were.
“The cows are terrified after what they went through,” said Serhii Vorobyov, the farm’s deputy manager. “They are just like soldiers who’ve been on the frontline. They are scared if you just go near them.”
The surviving farm workers in this village near Balakliia, in Kharkiv oblast, are every bit as damaged. When the Russians – a motorised rifle regiment all the way from Kaliningrad and another from just across the border in Valuiki – first took over the farm on 3 March last year, relations between occupiers and occupied were initially terse but civil. All that changed after the Russians took heavy losses in an engagement with Ukrainian forces.
“They looked like the same people but they behaved totally differently. You can see madness in their eyes,” said Yurii Vovchenko, the farm manager. “They were shooting at people on the streets, yelling and screaming, so people were scared and stayed at home after that.”
The Russian soldiers, most of them teenagers, invited some of the farm workers to milk the cows, and six of the labourers never returned. Their remains have not yet been found.
The Russians are long gone, but the occupation continues to hobble the Husarivka farm. The buildings are wrecked and the land is sown with mines. Until the devices are cleared, crops cannot be planted and the 230 surviving cattle cannot be put out to pasture.
The Kharkiv regional mine-clearing team helped to screen the buildings and courtyards, but they and the international organisations supporting them are stretched far too thin to clear everyone’s farmland this spring. The area of Ukraine exposed to conflict and therefore potentially mined is up to 25m hectares, the size of the UK.
The Halo Trust, a landmine clearance charity, says Ukraine faces “the heaviest landmine contamination the world has seen since the second world war”. The Ukrainian government is starting to decontaminate the territory it controls even as it conducts a counteroffensive aimed at liberating the rest.
“The government of Ukraine plans to return over 470,000 hectares of the most valuable agricultural land to productive use within four years,” said Yulia Svyrydenko, the economy minister. “Our plan is to survey, clear and return to use most of all potentially contaminated areas within 10 years.”
Kyiv and the Halo Trust and other charities are pressing for mine clearance to be at the centre of the Ukraine recovery conference, which begins in London on Wednesday, as the first step in restoring the agricultural sector.
“The Ukraine recovery conference must signal the start of an unprecedented effort to restore an industry that feeds the rest of the world,” said James Cowan, Halo’s CEO.
Halo has 800 Ukrainian staff working on demining, a figure expected to double next year, but by Ukrainian law they are not allowed to remove and destroy mines themselves. They can only map them and mark their location, a limitation that has slowed clearance.
An administrative fix is being worked on, but Vovchenko cannot wait for conferences and legal reform. The government is already demanding taxes and the landowners are expecting rent each month. “I have two choices: to go bankrupt and become a homeless person, or I can survive and do something about it,” he said.
Vovchenko and his workers are clearing their land themselves. They start off by dragging a long rope across each field to trigger any tripwires and then they walk across the land finding mines, unscrewing the detonators and stacking them up. He said they had found thousands, and he showed recent photos of piles of anti-tank mines in one of his trucks. They have been lucky so far that none of the mines have been booby-trapped.
“We are seeing a lot of anti-lift devices, a lot of booby traps and two or three mines being placed on top of each other deliberately,” said Mike Newton, who runs the Halo Trust regional headquarters. “But as you’ve seen, farmers just can’t wait, and we completely sympathise with that. People just need to get out and make a living, and they do that in the most incredible circumstances and there’s a great degree of innovation.”
Modern mine-clearing technology is beginning to arrive in Ukraine. On the outskirts of Izium, not far from Husarivka farm, a Croatian-made robot mine-clearer the size of a large bulldozer is being used by the regional emergency services to clear land under damaged electricity pylons so that repair work can begin.
It will be months until that work is completed. Meanwhile, some local farmers have made low-budget approximations of the commercial robots. At Oleksandr Kryvtsun’s farm at Hrakove, about 40 miles north of Izium, the workers have welded bits of an abandoned Russian tank and armoured car on to an old tractor and its harrow and then wired it up to a battery-powered remote controller. The resulting machine looks like it belongs in a Mad Max film. The operator sits at a safe distance in the scoop of a bulldozer made comfortable with a wooden crate and some cushions and works the remote control panel, running the tractor up and down the fields, triggering mines.
“We realised we couldn’t wait to start planting so we took means into our own hands. We saw how the foreign machines looked and made something similar with our hands,” Kryvtsun said.
It took about two months to perfect. They have since made similar contraptions for five other farmers nearby and now have a line of customers for their machines. “Circumstances make us innovators,” he said. “They push us to think in new ways.”
