Guest
On July 30, in a densely inhabited working-class district of western Donetsk, in a field with garden plots for nearby apartment residents, I saw the nefarious “petal“ or “butterfly“ mines which Ukraine the following day dropped on the central of Donetsk. In the large courtyard of an apartment complex, I watched from a safe distance as Emergency Services timer-detonated eight mines they had found around the grounds. The day prior, they destroyed 26. Another 150 were located and destroyed using a radio-controlled minesweeper. But there remains much work to restore the streets and courtyards to safety. Some types of these anti-personnel mines have a self-destruct timer. Others, including the ones Ukraine is firing, have a years-long shelf life. They do pretty much no damage to military vehicles, and as such their use in Donbass is insidious – deliberately targeting civilians, to leave them maimed. Out of the 6 million such mines Ukraine initially declared in its possession, only 2 million have been reportedly destroyed as of 2018. *See part 1 on these mines here: Ukraine turns Donetsk into a minefield using banned ‘Petal’ mines -Ukrainian Terrorism: Firing Munitions Containing Petal Mines On Donbass Orphanage, Another War Crime
