Donetsk

• By the time the shooting stops the UN predicts that Ukraine will be one of the most mine-contaminated countries in the world.
• According to Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, in March alone, “724 people have been blown up on Russian mines, 226 of them killed”.
• Landmines also make it very difficult for humanitarian organisations to move relief supplies in areas that may or may not have been cleared.

Case study: Angola

• This is a humanitarian tragedy that adds to the complexity of post-war development and presents huge environmental problems.
• For example, during a research trip to Angola in 2019, in Cuito Cuanavale, a town and municipality in Cuando Cubango province, my group of researchers encountered roads that are still inaccessible nearly 40 years after the conflict due to the presence of mines.
• During our visit, our safest option was flying, an option that is out of reach for most Angolans.

A land contaminated

• Many of the roughly 14 million people who are displaced and about 8 million who have fled to neighbouring countries will want to return.
• This will be impossible without surveying the land, getting rid of mines and declaring it safe.
• Once that is done, the public will need to be educated about the risks of unexploded ordnance.
• A report on de-mining from international thinktank Globsec has predicted a 45% reduction of arable grain land after two years of war.

Costly legacy

• As of July 8, the World Bank estimated that mine clearance and mitigation once the war was over would cost more than US$37 billion (£28.5 billion).
• This is huge – especially when you consider the cost of the continuing humanitarian crises and conflicts in other regions.
• Recovery will not be complete until these people’s streets and farms are cleared, their livelihoods restored and their children can go to school or play outside without fear of explosions.

• Initially, there were questions on how the dam collapsed or who was to blame, but mounting evidence indicates that the dam was deliberately breached by Russia.
• In my view, as a career U.S. special forces officer, the simplest answer is most often correct and provides the most likely explanation for the dam’s destruction.
• It’s my belief that Russia deliberately destroyed the dam to defend against the Ukrainian counteroffensive that it believed was imminent.

An age-old military strategy

• Quite to the contrary, it is an effective defensive technique that dates back hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
• In another instance, the Chinese military breached levees along the Yellow River in 1938 to slow the Japanese advance.

How Ukraine has used the same tactic

• The Ukranians also deliberately flooded the Zdvyzh and Teteriv rivers to make them unfordable and bolster their defense of Kyiv.
• The destruction of the Irpin dam was fairly limited: 50 of the small village of Demydiv’s 750 homes were destroyed.
• There is also a threat of floating landmines and an ongoing challenge to provide drinking water to thousands.

How the flooding supports Russia’s defense

• In such a posture, the Russian defense has some advantages.
• Defenders fight from fortified positions, whereas attackers must advance from exposed, vulnerable positions while overcoming obstacles, such as flooded streets.
• The defender, by contrast, must spread its forces across the battlefield, if it cannot correctly anticipate the point of attack.

A natural defense

• Nor in my view could they correctly anticipate the location of Ukraine’s main counteroffensive effort.
• It also created a humanitarian crisis that Russia no doubt anticipated, and has further leveraged to its tactical advantage.
• Sadly, the flooding of the Dnieper river will likely be more devastating and last much longer.

• Coverage over the past winter months, for example, has focused on how Ukrainians are fighting in WWI-like muddy trenches in Bakhmut, while Russia suffers almost WWI levels of casualties.
• Many of the WWI comparisons stress the unmodern nature of what is happening on Ukraine’s battlefields.
• And, most importantly, by making these kinds of historical comparisons, we detach ourselves from the war’s horrors and violence.

Unmodern and modern war

• In these comparisons, WWI does not serve as the benchmark of modern war, but as the haunted image of primitive industrial warfare from more than a century ago.
• What’s so characteristic of WWI, and seems so unmodern, is its lack of progress.
• And while we have seen drones and other hi-tech tools of war on the news, we haven´t seen much progress on pushing back the frontline.

Underestimating Russia’s objectives

• The unmodern is, of course, closely associated not just with the war in general, but especially with Russia’s conduct.
• But by tying Russia’s conduct to a stereotypical image of WWI fighting, we might stop analysing the full context.
• One might also lose sight of the toll the current fight might be taking on the “more modern” Ukraine’s forces.
• Is it a war against Ukraine, or a war against the west that happens to be fought in and over Ukraine?

Disengaging from reality

• But that is a dangerous and misleading thought, as it isolates what is happening in Ukraine from our own times.
• What we see in Ukraine is not a historical horror show, it is the ugly face of full-scale modern war.
• Over the past decades, western society has become strangely unaware of what happens in a modern war.

• We, the leaders of the Group of Seven (G7), convened today with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
• The G7 firmly condemn and unequivocally reject the illegal attempted annexation by Russia of Ukraine's Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions in addition to the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the City of Sevastopol.
• In solidarity with Ukraine, the G7 Leaders welcome President Zelenskyy's readiness for a just peace.
• We will act in solidarity and close coordination to address the negative impact of Russia's aggression for global economic stability, including by continuing to cooperate to ensure energy security and affordability across the G7 and beyond.