KIEV (dpa) – Ukrainian army sapper Anatoly Babiy used his bare hands to excavate the dirt from around a rusty, but still potentially dangerous, artillery round buried in a farm field.
The officer scrutinized the shell with professional aplomb. Ukraine’s black earth is packed with explosives left over from the last century’s wars. Babiy’s job is to defuse them. And he does that – on average a dozen or so rounds a week.
When it came to coaxing the 150 millimetre shell – probable of German origin – out of its shallow grave, he was cautious.
“That pin sticking out of the front end is the fuse, that’s what makes the shell go off,” he explained to a dpa reporter. “So when when you dig these things up… no quick movements.”
Babiy, 34, gingerly lifted the explosive and walked off with it, cradling the munition much as a father would hold a baby.
Major Babiy has a wife and two daughters.
He leads one of three army explosive-clearing teams operating in greater Kiev, a region the size of Luxembourg.
“There are few places in the world that have been fought over as much as Ukraine,” explained Babiy’s commander, Colonel Oleg Kuchinsky. “When people dig around here, there is a good chance they’ll uncover old explosives.”
Every year, Kuchinsky estimates, 123 army bomb squads dispose of between 15,000 and 18,000 rounds of old ammunition long buried and recently unearthed. Yet in the 10 years Ukraine has been independent, its army engineers have a perfect record: some 365,000 pieces of ordnance disposed of and no casualties among the bomb disposal teams.
But civilian casualties are a different story: accurate statistics are difficult to get, but officials estimate that around 1,000 people are killed or injured by old shells every year.
No one knows how many old shells there are or where they are. Colonel Vyacheslav Grezhniuk, Ukrainian Army anti-mining operations commander, explains that though there has been no fighting since 1950s (when nationalist partisans were fighting Soviet troops), the amount of munitions found every year has remained remarkably stable.
“We clear old ammunition caches and people find new ones,” he said. “Rains expose more…we have enough explosives buried in our country to keep us engineers busy for centuries.”
Grezhniuk said the most explosive-packed parts of Ukraine include caverns around Sevastopol (from a giant siege during 1941), the mouth of the Danube river (from sunken warships as well as unexploded bombs and torpedoes), Kharkiv (from three tank battles) and parts of the Carpathian mountains (World War One, World War Two, the Russian Civil War and the Russo-Polish war).
Ukraine invests little cash in bomb-clearing work. Babiy’s salary works out to less than 30 dollars a month.
The armoured vest that he wears might be tough enough to keep his corpse intact enough for identification if that 150 millimetre shell had exploded, but little more.
Babiy says he doesn’t mind the danger, but regrets that his low income means his wife has to work as well.
Foreign military professionals regard Ukrainian army engineers poorly-equipped and too willing to risk their lives.
Western sappers these days use computer data bases to identify and determine how best to dispose of explosives. Ukrainians depend on less systematic personal knowledge. Where Babiy’s gentle hands excavate the artillery round, a western technician might use a robot with a claw.
But Grezhniuk counters that by saying that U.S., German, and Danish engineers have died in Afghanistan trying to defuse Taliban dumps of old Soviet ammunition. Ukrainians would have defused them without casualties, he says.
For the Babiy family, of course, international comparisons of disposal techniques are far less important than the fact that Papa simply comes home from work.
Major Babiy says it makes little sense fretting about disposing of explosives for a living, “because in this job worrying too much can be dangerous.”
The Babiy girls Vita, 13, and Karina, 4, are even less concerned about their father’s career choice.
“No I haven’t told them about my job,” Babiy said. “Maybe later, when they get older.”
