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DOVHENKE, Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine — The longtime breadbasket of Europe is now raising a grim bumper crop of mines, shells and rockets.
After more than two years of war with Russia, an estimated 30% of Ukraine’s territory has been contaminated by land mines and unexploded ordnance, threatening one of the world’s great agriculture exporters and the livelihoods and lives of Ukrainian farmers.
A visitor coming to this town not far from the 600-mile-plus front line separating the Ukrainian and Russian forces would be forgiven for thinking he had inadvertently wandered onto the set of a postapocalyptic movie. Once a quiet agricultural community on the administrative border between Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, Dovhenke has been devastated by months of brutal fighting as Ukrainian and Russian forces wrestle for control of the region.
Not a single building in the village has been left unscathed. Most houses have been reduced to piles of charred rubble and mangled steel. Soviet-era 122 cm GRAD rockets jut out of backyards or are buried into the asphalt as if the battle had ended only yesterday.
What once was the village’s House of Culture has been torn apart by shelling, its mangled roof creaking ominously in the wind. Of the 800 people officially living in Dovhenke before the full-scale invasion, only about 30 remain. They eke out a living in homes deprived of electricity or running water.
Igor Knyazev, 44, is one of them.
A short, energetic man with close-cropped hair and a dry sense of humor, he once ran a thriving operation on the edge of the village with his father, growing wheat, corn and an assortment of vegetables.
“No one in Ukraine lived like we did here,” he recalled proudly. “But nothing has survived — not the house, not the farm, not the tractors. Not even the goats.”
The father of three fled the village with his family in the early days of March 2022 and returned to Dovhenke after surging Ukrainian forces recaptured the Kharkiv region in the counteroffensive of September 2022. Upon his return, Mr. Knyazev found his farm and tractors destroyed, his grain and seeds incinerated, and his animals dead.
Undeterred, the farmer got back to work. Armed with only a commercial metal detector, once a hobby, and a fierce determination to rebuild, he started surveying his fields, marking the locations of mines, cluster ammunition rockets and artillery shells for the de-miners to remove.
“I don’t want charity. I don’t want a handout,” he said. “I just want to be able to work my land and grow my produce.”
Shelling has rendered his roughly 125 acres of land mostly inarable. Visits of military de-miners have been few and far between. Although he is back in his family home, the impact and aftershocks of the nearby war are on display daily.
“Here’s what’s left of their car,” said Mr. Knyazev, gesturing at a destroyed wreck parked in front of his house. A few weeks earlier, a team of Ukrainian explosive ordnance disposal technicians drove over an anti-tank mine as they surveyed his field. The engine block absorbed most of the explosion, and the four men miraculously survived.
Not everyone in Dovhenke has been so lucky. Mr. Knyazev said several returning residents have been injured by “petal mines” — small surface plastic explosives released by Russian forces and so light that they can be carried in waterways and float downstream after heavy rains or snow — and other unexploded ordnance.
“It’s not a road, it’s not a field anymore. It’s a graveyard,” he sighed as he gazed on his field. “Sooner or later, they would have run into something.”
Short-term, long-term dangers
Ukrainian authorities say 67,000 square miles of the vast country’s territory, or about one-third of the country’s total surface area, require mine clearance, a long and costly process made all the more difficult by the ongoing fighting. Besides the immediate threat posed should the munitions explode, the innumerable shells and rockets buried deep in Mr. Knyazev’s land are also leaking heavy metals and toxic chemicals, such as arsenic or mercury, leading to widespread pollution of agricultural land.
“Surface waters are contaminated with toxic runoff, military debris and mines, and rivers can carry these pollutants into seas and oceans,” said Daniel Hryhorczuk, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois School of Public Health. “Meanwhile, the soils are contaminated from toxic residues of explosives, from demolition debris, hazardous spills and leaking lubricants and fluids from military vehicles.”
As Mr. Knyazev led the way through the wreckage of his farm, a plume of black smoke towered over the horizon — a reminder that the fighting in the region was far from over.
In his backyard, the farmer had gathered dozens of spent cluster ammunition rockets into a pile, hoping to repurpose them later into coffee tables: “I’m going to clean them, paint them, and I’ll mount some small, round glass panel on them,” he explained. “I know people will buy them — and they won’t be cheap.”
The profits he expects from this venture are unlikely to cover the losses of his produce and agricultural equipment, which the farmer says amount to 13 million hryvnias, or more than $320,000.
“We had our combine harvester, planters, tractors. There was a workshop, various machines — basically, everything we needed,” he said. “We had also already bought all the seeds and the fertilizers for 2022.”
Ukraine was one of the world’s biggest farm-sector exporters, producing enough food before the war to feed 400 million people annually. Ukrainian farmers have been among the worst affected by Russia’s invasion. The country’s food exports dropped by 96% during the first month of the war, and its key crop outputs were reduced by almost a third in 2022.
“Russia’s military occupation of eastern Ukraine has had a significant adverse impact on Ukraine’s agricultural production and export capacity,” said Leisha McParland, public information officer at the United States Agency for International Development. “Farmers in these regions need assistance with both export logistics and input distribution, including seeds, fertilizers and water purification equipment that is increasingly difficult to procure as Russia targets transportation infrastructure.”
A report by the humanitarian group Mercy Corps last month highlighted another problem: the lack of workers to help prepare the fields and bring in the harvest. Millions of Ukrainians have fled the war zones or left the country altogether, putting a massive strain on the labor market.
“A lack of labor across the agricultural sector is a significant problem that limits production,” the report noted.
Meanwhile, Mr. Knyazev has returned to farming and is now waiting to harvest his potatoes, the only crop he can reliably grow because of the lack of space.
“I started here from scratch 20 years ago,” he said, kneeling to inspect the stems, “and I’ll do it all again.”
• Guillaume Ptak can be reached at gptak@washingtontimes.com.
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