Clearing the Kyiv region, street by street

I drove north of Kyiv that spring, once the roads reopened. What I remember is the tape. Red and white plastic strung across gardens, verges, the entrances of houses, marking ground that had not yet been checked.

Clearance in Bucha, Irpin, Borodianka and the settlements around them was slow because it had to be. Teams from the State Emergency Service and accredited international operators worked through gardens, cellars, roadsides, schoolyards and farmland, recording and removing unexploded ordnance and improvised devices.

What partners supplied

Protective equipment, detectors, mechanical clearance machines, vehicles and training, funded by donor governments and channelled through operators already accredited to work in Ukraine. Equipment that would normally take months to procure was released from existing stocks.

Only after that could anything else start: the electricity crews, the water engineers, the builders, and eventually the families. Every photograph of a rebuilt street in Irpin has a sapper standing invisibly behind it.