DOVHENKE, Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine — The breadbasket of Europe is now raising a grim bumper crop of mines, shells and rockets.
After more than two years of war with Russia, an estimated 30% of Ukraine’s territory has been contaminated by landmines and unexploded ordnance, threatening one of the world’s great agriculture exporters and the livelihoods — and lives — of Ukrainian farmers.
A visitor coming to this town not far from the 600-mile-plus front line separating the Ukrainian and Russian forces would be forgiven for thinking he had inadvertently wandered on to the set of a post-apocalyptic movie : Once a quiet agricultural community located on the administrative border between Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, Dovhenke has been devastated by months of brutal fighting as Ukrainian and Russians forces wrestled for control of the region.
Not a single building in the village has been left unscathed, with most houses having been reduced to piles of charred rubble and mangled steel. Soviet-era 122cm GRAD rockets are everywhere, jutting out of people’s backyards or buried into the asphalt, as if the battle had only ended yesterday.
What once was the village’s House of Culture has been torn apart by shelling, its mangled roof now creaking ominously in the wind. Of the 800 people officially living in Dovhenke prior to the full-scale invasion, only about 30 now remain, eking out a living in homes deprived of electricity or running water.
Igor Knyazev, 44, is one of them.
A short energetic man with close-cropped hair and a dry sense of humor, he once ran with his father a thriving operation on the edge of the village, growing wheat, corn and a wide assortment of vegetables, from cucumbers to watermelons.
“No one in Ukraine lived like we did here,” he recalled proudly. “But nothing has survived — not the house, not the farm, not the tractors. Not even the goats.”
The father of three fled the village with his family in the early days of March 2022, returning to Dovhenke after the recapture of the Kharkiv region by surging Ukrainian forces in the counteroffensive of September 2022. Upon his return, Mr. Knyazev found his farm and tractors entirely destroyed, his grain and seeds incinerated and his animals dead.
Undeterred, the farmer got back to work. Armed with only a commercial metal detector — once a hobby of his — and a fierce determination to rebuild, he started surveying his fields, marking the location of mines, cluster ammunition rockets and artillery shells for the de-miners to remove.
“I don’t want charity. I don’t want a handout,” he said. “I just want to be able to work my land and grow my produce.”
But so far his roughly 125 acres of land have been rendered mostly inarable by the shelling, while the visits of military de-miners have been few and far between. Although he’s back in his family home, the impact and aftershocks of the nearby war are on display daily.
“Here’s what’s left of their car,” said Mr. Knyazev, gesturing at a destroyed wreck parked in front of his house. A few weeks prior, a team of Ukrainian explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technicians drove over an anti-tank mine as they surveyed his field. The engine block absorbed most of the explosion and the four men miraculously survived.
Not everyone in Dovhenke has been so lucky: According to Mr. Knyazev, a number of returning residents have been injured by “petal mines” — small surface plastic explosives released by Russian forces and so light they can be carried in waterways and float downstream after heavy rains or snow — and other unexploded ordnance.
“It’s not a road, it’s not a field anymore, it’s a graveyard,” he sighed, gazing upon his field. “Sooner or later, they would have run into something.”
Short-term, long-term dangers
According to Ukrainian authorities, 67,000 square miles of the vast country’s territory – or about a third of the country’s total surface area – require mine clearance, a long and costly process made all the more difficult by the ongoing fighting. Besides the immediate threat posed should the munitions explode, the innumerable shells and rockets buried deep in Igor Knyazev’s land are also leaking heavy metals and toxic chemicals, such as arsenic or mercury, leading to widespread pollution of agricultural land.
“Surface waters are contaminated with toxic runoff, military debris and mines, and rivers can carry these pollutants into seas and oceans,” said Dr. Daniel Hryhorczuk, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois School of Public Health. “Meanwhile, the soils are contaminated from toxic residues of explosives, from demolition debris, hazardous spills and leaking lubricants and fluids from military vehicles.”
As Mr. Knyazev led the way through the wreckage of his farm, a plume of black smoke could be spotted towering over the horizon — a reminder that the fighting in the region is still far from over.
In his backyard, the farmer had gathered dozens of spent cluster ammunition rockets into a pile, hoping to repurpose them later into coffee tables: “I’m going to clean them, paint them, and I’ll mount some small, round glass panel on them,” he explained. “I know people will buy them — and they won’t be cheap.”
But the profits he expects from this new venture are unlikely to cover the losses of his produce and agricultural equipment, which the farmer says amount to 13 million hryvnias, or over $320,000.
“We had our combine harvester, planters, tractors, there was a workshop, various machines — basically, everything we needed,” he said. “We had also already bought all the seeds and the fertilizers for 2022.”
Long known as the “breadbasket of Europe,” Ukraine was one of the world’s biggest farm-sector exporters, producing enough food prior to the war to feed 400 million people a year. Ukrainian farmers have been among the worst affected by Russia’s invasion, with the country’s food exports dropping by 96% during the first month of the war and its key crop outputs reduced by almost a third in 2022.
“Russia’s military occupation of eastern Ukraine has had a significant adverse impact on Ukraine’s agricultural production and export capacity,” said Leisha McParland, public information officer at the United States Agency for International Development. “Farmers in these regions need assistance with both export logistics and input distribution, including seeds, fertilizers and water purification equipment that is increasingly difficult to procure as Russia targets transportation infrastructure.”
A new report by the humanitarian group Mercy Corps this week highlighted another problem: the lack of workers to help prepare the fields and bring in the harvest. Millions of Ukrainians have fled the war zones — or left the country altogether — putting a massive strain on the labor market
“A lack of labor across the agricultural sector is a significant problem that limits production,” the report noted.
Meanwhile, Mr. Knyazev has already gotten back to farming, and is now waiting to harvest his potatoes — the only crop he can reliably grow, for lack of space.
“I’ve started here from scratch, 20 years ago,” he said, kneeling down to inspect the stems, “and I’ll do it all again.”