No talk of whether these mines would have a limited lifespan or a remote triggerable inert command in that article. But I imagine they learned to include those features from the last time they placed mines.
Does not really matter that much as the foe from the east will litter the place with their nastiest stuff anyways. The warzone will be wasteland for years or decades, so it will make very little sense to complicate one of the most simple pieces of equipment. It’s also one of the most effective one against the centuries old ”meat wave” tactic.
I really hope they will wait with deployment of mines until the last moment, regard it as a last resort and not a shoot and forget strategy where they basically work as an invisible wall
At this point, I think what is important is Ukraine keeps VERY good documentation of where it puts mines, whether from personnel, UAVs or artillery launched methods… SOMEWHERE.
Honestly, I might just do it on paper records with many duplicates in different locations, if not the digital air-gapped equivalent of that… but I would keep very good records no matter how I did it.
Do it in a way that can’t be turned against you, which is of course the problem… and why mines end up being placed willy nilly… since any kind of documentation is an existential threat to the mine placing process after a certain degree of accuracy… **but in this day and age I think if you are going to use mines, you should do everything you can to help friendly forces figure out where the mines you placed are after you win the war without losing the war in the process by creating a cybersecurity target with a database of all the mine locations.
One way Ukrainian forces can and probably are doing this if they are smart is to map large swathes of the Ukraine countryside with high resolution UAV mounted magnetometers so that if they are subsequently mined a high resolution magnetometer survey at a later date can identify the changes/anomalies and help direct mine removal crews. Cybersecurity around this process would of course be existentially important to the strategic war effort…
This isn’t a solution, mines are an awful weapon, but I think this is where the realistic difference in lifesaving especially of civilians can happen.
edit I am not talking about the idea that the Ukrainian military has no idea where the mines it placed are, but rather that the idea of geolocating each mine you dig into the ground into a convenient point database could be a serious threat to the fundamental tactical effectiveness of said mines… if the enemy can hack your cybersecurity than they have the map too and it is much worse for them to have a precise map than it is good for you to have one. That is the basic calculus of this type of warfare, and is only one of the reasons war is awful and Russia should not keep pretending it can win this war.
I think for a long time the conversation from people upset about people dying to landmines has been “ok, STOP USING LANDMINES” but obviously at the scale of brutality of mechanized mass scale landwar that Russia has forced Ukraine into things begin to look very different understandably especially given the clear effectiveness of these weapons against Russian armor especially after it has been shaken by artillery fire or FPV attacks.
In general, mine use should be heavily discouraged internationally as a method of war, especially internal civil war or guerilla conflicts, but in the case of Ukraine, Russia is rolling tanks through its countryside… so I think the rest of the world can recognize arbitrarily mining the s^%$ out of your home is a bad idea while recognizing that Ukrainians are going to mine their home to stop Russian tanks from literally driving through the backdoor of their kitchen with a tank. This isn’t a question of law, you would do the same, so would your grandma.
I think what the international community should focus on is from a policy standpoint delineating the difference between those two types of mine use. To put this in precise terms, there is mine use 1.) Because it is a cheap way to create terror, deny a home to people, and indiscriminately murder people that is lazier and more evil than bullets. 2.) Using mines because you are actively trying to stop an armored fullscale landwar invasion of your home.
There is a long history of international opposition to landmine use because forces can very quickly create a large amount of mines and place them into the ground… and the situation created can be a problem for far longer than the lifespan of any of the beligerants involved. It is a perfect weapon for authoritarian regimes as it directly enables crude but large industrial capacity to oppress and terrorize groups of people.
This really… if you think about it… has NOTHING to do with how Ukraine is currently employing landmines and I think the international community really risks shooting itself in the foot here by getting hung up on this as if Ukraine was going back on any kind of desire to employ weapons the international community has agreed are weapons of nearly last resort…
I will become concerned with how Ukraine is employing landmines when they are actively supplying them to guerilla groups in countries with active civil wars on entirely seperate continents that they have no business being involved in… I say that facetiously but I am trying to make a point here about how you can recognize landmines are brutal and also see why the Ukrainian military might keep using them anyways.
Do you want to be the Ukranian general who watches as a Russian armored column rolls catastrophically through the backline of your defenses and there is nothing to slow them down… it wasn’t even your fault the intelligence given to you was wrong and you miscalculated… if you had mined the road somewhere though at least that would slow the Russian column down enough to keep the major civilian center from getting attacked immediately and give your armor, drones, artillery and airpower crucial time to react… but you decided against it because you didn’t want to use mines out of principle…
Those are the kinds of things you think about fighting in a war like this, I am not saying I have the answer but concluding “only use them as a means of last resort” means something very complicated and nuanced to the people actually fighting the war…
Modern warfare is all about not giving your enemy time in every meaning of the word, which means if the enemy is truly beating you, then you will never have the moment to go “ah! this is the last desperate moment!”. Fundamentally when constructing a defense you have to begin from this axiom, this is something that people fighting wars have been forced to come to terms with since the beginning of war.
Unfortunately war keeps proving the mines are a very useful tool, and they work well as part of a battle plan when used early. That makes the shoot and forget strategy a very useful one for any military commander.
The better answer is limited lifespan. Maybe remote triggers - if the enemy doesn’t learn how to trigger them. That is when we think the current battle is over any mines left should just destroy themselves in hopes that nobody happens to be near them.
