In Ukrainian villages where Russian Shahed drones come down regularly, children have begun disassembling them with screwdrivers to harvest microchips—and Ukraine has had to invent a new category of demining work to handle them, one that the international playbook does not recognize.
Ukraine’s deputy minister responsible for humanitarian demining said the global rulebook does not contain a chapter on what to do when a child takes a screwdriver.
When mine awareness teams went into the local schools to warn the children away, the children asked them something the teams had not prepared for: please, teach us how to do this safely. The risk—live munitions don’t always detonate on impact—is obvious.
Ihor Bezkaravainyi told Euromaidan Press the country has had to write its own playbook. Ukraine’s deputy minister responsible for humanitarian demining said the International Mine Action Standards (IMAS), the global rulebook for cleaning up after wars, do not contain a chapter on what to do when a child takes a screwdriver and a bicycle into a contaminated field.
Prohibition does not work
The standards distinguish between humanitarian demining—the structured, methodical process of clearing land with sappers and dogs—and now, in Bezkaravainyi’s framing, what he calls operational demining: the fast government response that has to follow immediately after a strike, before formal clearance procedures even begin.
The category did not exist in international practice. “If a Shahed lands in a cultivated field, no chapter in IMAS tells you what to do next,” he said. “It does not exist.”
“Prohibition does not work. We have to engage with reality.”
The first reaction from international specialists, Bezkaravainyi said, was that the children should be strictly prohibited from approaching the drones.
“In theory, yes,” he said. “In practice, a child takes a bicycle, rides into a field, and starts working on a Shahed with a screwdriver. Prohibition does not work. We have to engage with reality.”
The children-and-Shaheds case is not the only place where the international playbook has run out of answers in Ukraine. Two years ago, Ukraine built its national demining priorities by following the IMAS sequence: first infrastructure, then socially important sites, then economic activities, then everything else, including natural parks and forests. It looked like common sense.
Uneven innovation
Then last summer, the wildfires started. Firefighting trucks could not get through mined roads. In Kharkiv Oblast, helicopters could not deploy because the front line was too close. Ukraine lost both firefighters and forest in the Kharkiv wildfires. “We lost two years on the forests,” Bezkaravainyi said. “Now we are starting again from scratch.”
In this war, innovation has been remarkably effective on the killing side—Russian Shahed drones, fiber-optic FPV strikes, AI-targeted artillery.
On the cleanup side, the picture is bleaker. Small plastic mines cannot be identified by drones or satellites. TM-62 anti-tank mines cannot be excavated by machines without human work afterward. Demining machines do not actually demine—they identify, and humans clear.
“Innovation works very well for killing in this war.”
The real innovation in cleanup, Bezkaravainyi said, is in data analysis: knowing where not to look, so resources do not go to land that was never mined. “Innovation works very well for killing in this war,” he said. “Less well for cleaning up after it.”
The 20-kilometer zone along the front line, Bezkaravainyi noted, is not described in any existing international standard. “And the modern war is not yet described in any mine action standard,” he said. “We are writing the standards as we go.”
