Ukrainian Defense Ministry says its demining specialists have been trained to use new tools to remotely locate explosive ordnance. Among them are drones and special magnetometers.
The shift is in who goes first into a mined field. Instead of a sapper advancing on foot with a detector, a drone-mounted magnetometer surveys the ground from the air, detecting hidden metal by reading changes in the Earth's magnetic field.
The Ministry says the technology should speed the clearing of territory liberated from Russian occupation in work that has so far covered more than 460,000 hectares since the full-scale war.
Sending machine where person cannot go
The training ran at the Ukrainian Training and Testing Complex (UTTC), a facility the Defense Ministry established to develop technologies for mine action, civil protection, and environmental safety.
Specialists worked through the full cycle of operating unmanned aerial complexes: deploying, applying, and maintaining the drones and their sensor systems; running the ground control stations; planning flight missions and monitoring their execution; and piloting the aircraft in practice.
The aim is to distance by putting a machine, not a person, over ground that may be sown with mines.
Ground gives up its hidden metal
Particular attention was paid to the magnetometers. The systems scan terrain and locate buried ordnance by mapping magnetic anomalies, allowing teams to identify dangerous areas without entering them.
The Defense Ministry says the approach reduces the risk to life and is meant to accelerate the survey of de-occupied land, where mines, unexploded shells, and other remnants of the Russian war remain in the soil.
As a result of Russia’s armed aggression, Ukraine has become one of the most heavily contaminated countries in the world with explosive hazards, according to UkrInform.
Due to the enormous demand and limited time available to meet it, a decision was made to rapidly specialize State Emergency Service personnel with technical backgrounds through accelerated training courses.
Thanks to this approach, Ukrainian educational institutions trained more than 1,500 specialists for the pyrotechnic units of the State Emergency Service during the first years of the war.
