Amnesty Urges War Crimes Probe of Landmines in Russian-Occupied Ukraine

Amnesty International on Friday demanded a "prompt, thorough, independent, and impartial investigation" into the use of antipersonnel landmines, "which litter territories in Ukraine formerly and currently occupied by Russian forces."

The Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor says that Ukraine is "severely contaminated" with antipersonnel landmines, which Russia's troops have used since 2014, but particularly since Russian President Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

"Landmines have been documented in 11 of Ukraine's 27 regions: Chernihiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Kyiv, Luhansk, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Sumy, and Zaporizhzhia," according to the monitor's latest update, published in November. "Russian forces have used at least 13 types of antipersonnel mines in Ukraine since February 2022."

Ukraine is a state party to the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Antipersonnel Mines and on Their Destruction of 1997 but lacks legislation to enforce its implementation. Human Rights Watch last summer gathered evidence of the Ukrainian military's use of the banned mines. Russia is not a party to the treaty.

Patrick Thompson, a Ukraine researcher at Amnesty, said Friday that "in every region in Ukraine that was formerly occupied by Russia, we have seen evidence of civilians killed and injured by antipersonnel mines left behind by Russian forces."

"They are a daily, deadly threat to civilians. Some have been deliberately placed in civilian homes where they maim and kill," Thompson highlighted. "There must be an effective investigation into all such incidents as possible war crimes."

The group shared just one survivor's story of encountering a mine:

In March 2022, Russian forces evicted Oleksandr* (not his real name) and his mother from their flat in Snihurivka, in the region of Mykolaiv. A Russian military unit took over the entire apartment block until it was forced to withdraw following fierce fighting around Snihurivka in November 2022.

After the Russian retreat, Oleksandr returned to the apartment block to assess how badly it had been damaged. Upon entering the basement, he stepped on a disguised PFM-1 antipersonnel mine that had been placed under wooden planks. The mine exploded, Oleksandr fell, and landed on other disguised mines that had apparently, had been deliberately placed to injure or kill anyone entering the building. He lost both his left leg and arm in the incident.

“The deminers working to clear Ukraine of this threat are carrying out painstaking, dangerous work every day," Thompson noted. "While the scale of the problem is undeniably huge, the biggest obstacle to clearing Ukraine of landmines is Russia's ongoing aggression."

Thompson called on the international community to "commit to sustained financial and technical assistance to help Ukraine get rid of a danger that continues to wreck lives and livelihoods," and to continue fighting for an end to the use of the weapons.

"Countries must uphold the ban on the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of antipersonnel mines worldwide," he said. "There must be an end to the use of such indiscriminate weapons."

The most recent report from the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine states that the war has killed at least 11,284 civilians there since 2022 and injured another 22,594—though the actual tallies are believed to be "considerably higher."

"The number of civilian casualties is likely particularly undercounted in cities such as Mariupol (Donetsk region), Lysychansk, Popasna, and Sievierodonetsk (Luhansk region), where there was protracted intensive fighting at the start of the armed attack in 2022," according to the report.

While most of the deaths and injuries in Ukraine are attributed to "explosive weapons with wide area effects," the U.N. report accounts for at least 373 deaths and 855 injuries from "mines and explosive remnants of war."