Ukraine deploys robots and AI to clear landmines on Vietnam-era scale

In a weed-covered field in the Kharkiv region, Olena Kabanova, 58, crouched on her hands and knees with a shovel, cutting a neat square around a spot where a mine detector had signalled a suspicious object, the Guardian reported. The field was occupied by Russian soldiers four years ago and is now back under Ukrainian control, but it is littered with landmines. Civilians such as Kabanova, who works for the Halo Trust, are trying to make the land usable again.

Paul Heslop, programme manager for mine action at UNDP in Ukraine, said long-range drones were widening the problem. "What we're now seeing is the massive increase in the use of drone-delivered munitions," he said. "What already was a very high-intensity battle area is now potentially, through the use of drones on both sides, becoming a much wider area of contamination and a scale that we haven't seen since the Americans were dropping cluster munitions on the Ho Chi Minh trail."

Clearing the mines is beset by obstacles. Drone and missile attacks make working outdoors unsafe, and humanitarian workers are sometimes directly targeted. Newer threats include the POM-3, a small cylindrical mine used by Russian forces that can be mistaken for an abandoned vacuum flask and is detonated by the vibrations of approaching footsteps. Anda Riza, a unit commander with the Halo Trust, the largest international humanitarian demining organisation in Ukraine, said POM-3 mines mean there are "specific villages that we just completely avoid". Her colleague Valeriia Shumska said the types of landmines are "constantly developing and evolving".

Technology emerging from the conflict is also helping deminers work faster and more safely than the traditional hands-and-knees approach. Digging out a patch of land can take Kabanova up to 45 minutes; a new machine, the DMR-7, does it in five. The small, tank-like vehicle is fitted with a hosepipe that fires jets of compressed air. An operator standing at a safe distance uses a remote control to manoeuvre it into place, and the vehicle then blasts away a patch of soil in a mechanical whirr and a plume of dirt.

About $1.5bn has flowed into Ukraine's demining sector since the start of the full-scale invasion. The Halo Trust is experimenting with AI-powered image analysis, ground-penetrating radar and devices that can detect explosive material rather than only metal. Before 2022, much of Halo's surveillance work, looking for signs of explosives, was done with binoculars and maps; it is now carried out with drones and satellite imagery that can be analysed with the help of AI. Drone jamming systems used by both Russian and Ukrainian forces interfere with that work, however, and Halo has lost several drones to jamming and spoofing attacks.

The advances are not spread equally among those doing the clearing. In a field adjacent to the one where Kabanova was working, staff from the state emergency services were also clearing mines. Mykyta Shulzhenko, head of the mechanised demining unit, said his colleagues had started using drones for surveillance but were not yet able to use AI to analyse the drone-captured imagery. "I really hope this kind of technology will be implemented soon in our work," he said.

The Halo Trust alone spent nearly £50m in Ukraine in the year to 31 March 2025, dwarfing the state's annual budget of £28.6m for a programme to clear agricultural land of mines and unexploded ordnance. Dozens of other demining organisations with overlapping responsibilities and approaches also operate in the country, and responsibility for the sector is split across multiple government agencies. Attempts to reform the country's mine action law to bring it in line with international standards have faltered, the Guardian reported.