Meet the brave women volunteering to rid Ukraine of huge amounts of lethal unexploded weaponry
Two women wearing body armour are picking their way through a field of strimmed vegetation. Between them, they hold what looks like an enormous metal swing with the seat missing, covered in twisted black wires. One of the women has a black box slung around her neck. She isn’t taking her eyes off it. Iryna Kustokova, 38, a former aviation strategist, is watching the box’s meter to see if the needle jumps. Suddenly, the box lets out a warble. The women freeze.
This field in the Makarivs’kyi district of the Kyiv Oblast was a no-man’s-land between Russian and Ukrainian forces for a month at the start of the invasion in February. Six months on, Kustokova and her partner Ryta Mazankova, 48, are, with the aid of their long loop detector, looking for unexploded ordnance – the lethal remnants of war: bombs, grenades, mines.
It doesn’t make sense for there to be any mines here. There weren’t any pitched battles in this field, and it’s too far from the respective positions of each side to warrant defensive measures. Yet, according to the Ukrainian police, two farmers a week are killed by anti-tank mines left behind in their fields.
The women test again and the unmistakable alarm rings out. Kustokova and Mazankova do not move as they confer and then shout back to the rest of their team, who have already covered this ground. Relief. The beeping is just from a water pipe that runs to a nearby cattle farm, which they picked up earlier. The farm needs this land back as soon as possible. The women crack on; there is a lot of land to check.