Ukraine's Iron Harvest
A conversation with explosive ordnance disposal techs in Ukraine and a look at the UXO situation on the ground.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc419ada5-b319-4ccd-b19d-3aed62218bbc_1600x1200.jpeg)
Stu Miller and Michael Montoya are explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technicians working with Sons of Liberty International to clear unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Ukraine.
I spoke to them a couple weeks ago about their work in the country and the threat that UXO posed to civilians there.
A day after our conversation, they went out to survey UXO gathered from around the recently liberated city of Kherson in southern Ukraine. Photos from that survey and descriptions of the munitions they encountered are included below.
Ukraine’s State Emergency Service in August estimated that 27 percent of Ukrainian territory has been contaminated with landmines and other UXO during the first six months of Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country. It’s likely a high estimate and there is realistically no way to independently confirm that figure, but it’s a starting point toward estimating how much of Europe’s second-largest country is contaminated with explosives.
That estimation figures out to around 300,000 square kilometers of contaminated land — roughly the land area of Finland, the Philippines or Arizona. Contamination of even half that land is right up there with some of the most heavily contaminated nations in the world.
The situation in each country is unique, but looking at Vietnam and Egypt can provide some context for UXO contamination. A 2016 Vietnamese government survey estimated that roughly 23,500-24,000 square miles of Vietnam was contaminated with UXO, or about 20 percent of the country. In the 42 years between the U.S. withdrawal and 2017, those hazards killed around 39,000 people and injured 66,000. Egypt accounts for 20 percent of UXO worldwide because of fighting there between the United Kingdom and Germany in World War II, but coverage is far more concentrated — estimated at around 25,000 square kilometers, or about 9,700 square miles.
What is UXO?
There are a few definitions for UXO out there. The Australian Department of Defence considers UXO to be “any sort of military ammunition or explosive ordnance which has failed to function as intended.”
The Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining has a more detailed definition: “explosive ordnance that has been primed, fuzed, armed or otherwise prepared for use or used. It may have been fired, dropped, launched or projected yet remains unexploded either through malfunction or design or for any other reason.”
Basically, UXO includes armed bombs, mortars, and mines that haven’t exploded for whatever reason, usually because their fuzes fail. It sounds like they’d be safe since they didn’t go off, but that’s what makes them so dangerous. Even the slightest bump or manipulation of some rounds can trigger an explosion.
I don’t think I need to get too deep into the specifics of how munitions work to illustrate how dangerous UXO can be, but here’s a pretty dry video that explains how artillery shells, fuzes, and cluster rounds work.
UXO is an inevitable aftermath of conflict. At the end of the day, some of these bombs and shells and mines will fail to detonate as intended. Un-fired munitions packed with explosives are commonly left behind on battlefields as well, sometimes called abandoned explosive ordnance (AXO). Either way, these munitions are waiting for a reason to go off and its often unfortunate non-combatants who wind up triggering them.
In many conflicts these rounds and minefields are simply forgotten, but they can remain volatile for decades. World War II-era bombs kill around 20 people a year in the Solomon Islands, according to the New York Times, and enough World War I-era UXO is dug up by farmers across Europe each year that its come to be called the iron harvest.
Besides the threat to life, UXO is a long-term threat to local economies and particularly to agricultural activities. Spreading minefields and cluster munitions have rendered whole fields in Ukraine useless until EOD teams can clear them. Corn and wheat alone made up almost half of all Ukraine’s pre-war exports. A decades-long iron harvest could be catastrophic for the country.
Luckily, the Ukrainian government and international organizations have already started to dispose of the country’s UXO, but there’s no way to keep up with the pace of fighting. To illustrate just how much explosives can be left following a fight, the State Emergency Service in August said that EOD teams found and cleared 2,000 individual munitions from just 620 square kilometers of land.
UXO comes in a few varieties and in Ukraine there are three main contributors: landmines, unexploded cluster munitions, and artillery rounds. There is plenty of evidence of larger and unexploded munitions, but those larger munitions are far rarer than the workhorse artillery and mortar rounds being fired on an hourly basis across the front lines.
On the Ground
UXO is concentrated in Ukraine’s east, northeast, and south where the fighting has been the worst over the last year. Naturally, the areas around the front lines have been bombed, mortared, shelled, and mined more than anywhere else.
As part of a wider counteroffensive in the late summer and then fall, Ukrainian forces recaptured Kherson and the surrounding area west of the Dnieper River after nearly nine months under Russian control. The Ukrainians found the area littered with unexploded shells and rockets, as well as minefields and booby traps. One Ukrainian deminer said his team had cleared “several tons of mines” from just a roughly four square mile area over a month of work.
The images below are from Miller and Montoya’s recent survey in Kherson and show a variety of munitions gathered from the area. This is just some of the UXO found in the area but the mix is broadly representative of the sort of explosives that are used across the country.
It’s worth noting because of their shared military history as part of the Soviet Union, Ukraine and Russia use similar and often identical weapons systems. Most, if not all, of the munitions and weapons systems shown in these photos were either developed during the Soviet era or evolved from Soviet-era weapons systems. Ukraine has only in the last six months or so started large-scale adoption of NATO weaponry.
This first image below shows dozens of 125mm rounds that are fired by all of Russia and Ukraine’s main battle tanks, including several OF-26 high-explosive rounds. There also appears to be some 203mm and 152mm rounds. The tubes on the left are a variety of shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, including PG-27 disposable launchers, one RPG-30. Next to them are some TBG-7L thermobaric rocket propelled grenades.
The finned rounds in the lower center of the image below are 120mm OF-843 high-explosive mortar rounds.
What looks like large bullets below are massive 30x165mm auto-cannon rounds. They appear to be high-explosive tracer rounds. The silver objects on the left side of the box are assorted fuzes.
The round on the left here is an OF-26 high explosive round, the same type seen in the earlier photos. The two round objects are TM-62M anti-tank mines.
This last image shows a 220mm 9M27K rocket fired from the BM-27 Uragan and a smaller 122mm rocket fired from a BM-21 Grad. The 9M27K is the cluster munitions cargo version of the 220mm explosive rocket and are used to deliver cluster munitions or mines. Basically, the rocket opens up during flight and spreads the mines or cluster munitions (more or less grenades) over a swath of land.
For a look at other munitions and explosives found in Ukraine since February 2022, the Ukraine Collective Awareness to Unexploded Ordnance (Ukraine CAT-UXO) maintains a database with photos and information sent in from across the country.
You can also take a look at the Explosive Ordnance Guide for Ukraine from the GICHD. I used both the GICHD’s guide and Ukraine CAT-UXO’s database to help identify the munitions in SOLI’s photos.