For a week, the team led by Norislav inspected the homes of Buchaone of the deadliest cities during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the aim of identifying and destroying thousands of mines planted by enemy troops before retreating and preventing the re-emergence of life in this town.

At 23 years old, Norislav is the leader of his group of mine experts, one of five who have been operating daily in Bucha since it was released to find all these explosives planted by Russian troops after making of one of the largest massacres against the population. .civil, who graduated in more than 400 were executed.

Although there is no official data on the explosives already dumped in Bucha, a small town west of kyiv, Norislav’s team sees and destroys about 600 per day, this young mine specialist from Lugansk, where the war has been there since 2012..

House for house

About 30,000 of Bucha’s 35,000 residents fled before Russian troops entered the city and destroyed everything. They killed in cold blood, raped, broke water, gas and electricity systems, and stole as much property as they could, leaving the mines in their condition.

For this reason, Norislav’s team has to go to dozens of apartments and houses every day, to make sure they are safe before the neighbors go home.

“Access to the city is restricted, only residents can enter, but we need to check their homes first,” he told EFE.

Vladislau, 57, was waiting for the anti-mine squad outside his sister’s house, which had been occupied by Russian soldiers for almost a month and he feared something was left inside the explosives.

“They didn’t find anything,” he says relieved after the squad combed the area. Her sister fled on Bucha’s fifth day of work because her daughter was in a wheelchair and evacuation became difficult.

Now he is in France, but Vladislau assures him that he will return to the city when the war is over: We will rebuild the house. New doors and windows had to be put in, but my brother wanted to come back, he said.

In another building outside Bucha, Polina and her husband also called the anti-mine unit to search their apartment, where Russian troops had built a sort of operations base.

“The Russians entered the building and came here. The tall people slept on the floors, like us, and the soldiers stayed in the corridors ”, he assured from his home, after the squad searched for it.

A task that will be long

Dima was a goldsmith who a day before the work was finished renovating his new workshop. There is nothing left here, not even the outer wall. He called the anti-mine team because he saw a message in Russian in front of the store warning in red ink to “don’t go up to the eighth floor”.

Checking the block, the anti-mine unit saw a floor there approximately twenty unexploded anti-tank shellsthat they are going to collect using special materials and then destroy somewhere far away from civilians.

“It’s very difficult to demine the whole city and its surroundings. An example of this is that mines from the First and Second World Wars are still to be found,” said Hapchenko Dmytro, head of infrastructure for the Bucha mayor’s office. , in EFE.

According to the official, 90% of the city’s “critical infrastructure” has been removed, referring to the water, gas and electricity networks, which Russian soldiers destroyed until leaving Bucha without service.

“The goal is to destroy all the visible mines first, but it’s almost impossible to do it 100%. The more hidden ones, we can take years to find them,” he says.

Source: EFE

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