How your cash is rooting out Vladimir Putin's mines in Ukraine

How your cash is rooting out Vladimir Putin’s mines: Mail Force donations are helping to remove dangerous debris from warzone in Ukraine

• The Mail Force Ukraine appeal raised more than £10m after the Russian invasion
• Nearly £1.5m has gone to the Halo Trust who remove landmines from warzones
• Halo was supported by Princess Diana who walked through a minefield in Angola

Deep in a forest outside Kyiv the extraordinary generosity of Mail readers is now saving civilian lives amid a brutal war.

This spring the Mail Force Ukraine appeal raised more than £10million following the Russian invasion.

Now almost £1.5million of that sum has been donated to the Halo Trust, the charity that is dedicated to removing land mines and other dangerous debris from war zones.

Halo was a favourite cause of Princess Diana. One of the last and most defining images of the princess’s life was that of her walking through a Halo-protected minefield in Angola, south-west Africa.

She died months later in a car crash in Paris, 25 years ago this week. But her humanitarian legacy lives on, here, in Europe’s most dangerous conflict since the Second World War.

Dangerous work: Halo staff hunt mines in a forest outside Kyiv

Almost £1.5million has been donated to the Halo Trust, the charity that is dedicated to removing land mines and other dangerous debris from war zones

The Mail, in company with the British ambassador to Ukraine, Melinda Simmons, has witnessed a Halo operation in a forest an hour’s drive from the centre of the Ukrainian capital.

Superficially, mine clearance here is a gentle occupation. Operators work on hands and knees with garden shears and thin sticks. Birds sing in the treetops; butterflies flutter. It is peaceful. But the stakes are high.

The site is close to the Kyiv satellite town of Brovary, where a Russian armoured column was stopped by a succession of Ukrainian ambushes in the early weeks of the war. The images of that clash went around the world.

Blocked, the Russians established trenches and dugouts in a coniferous plantation next to the highway and surrounded their positions with mines and other booby traps. When they retreated at the end of March they did not remove these explosives.

A local 41-year-old civilian was subsequently killed by a mine while walking along a forest path. Halo was called in and is currently, painstakingly, making the forest safe for locals and forestry workers. The task could take more than a year, such is the area and the challenges of clearing ground among dense woodland.

Halo Trust told the Mail that across Ukraine there have been 118 incidents involving discarded military ordnance in Ukraine since the invasion. Eighty six people have been killed and 138 injured. The Trust is clearing 15 minefields in the Brovary and Bucha regions and surveying further areas near the city of Chernihiv, which was besieged by Russian forces throughout the spring.

Mail Force’s Ukraine Appeal gave the Halo Trust an initial £250,000 earlier this year. The total now given to the charity’s work in Ukraine by our readers almost matches that which HM Government has provided.

Thanks to the Mail donation Halo aims to increase its staffing in Ukraine from 400 to 600 by the end of the year.

But most of the Mail Force funding will go towards mechanical mine clearance equipment that can clear ordnance from Ukraine’s vast agricultural land.

The Russian invasion has created a global food crisis. Ukraine is one of the world’s major grain producers. The war has prevented many farmers from harvesting their crops. The Russian capture or blockade of Black Sea ports has also stopped exports to a number of Third World countries.

Ambassador Simmons said: ‘One cannot underestimate the work that Halo is doing in the Ukraine, not only in making these areas safe for civilians but for improving the security of food producing land that feeds the world.’

A Halo Trust spokesman said: ‘We are hugely grateful to the generosity of the Mail readers in providing us with this donation.

‘It will make a big difference to the lives of people here in Ukraine.’

Earlier I had met Serhii, a retired engineer aged 69, who lost his wife Luiba to a booby trap while they were picking mushrooms and raspberries in a wood west of Kyiv last month.

The Russians had occupied their village of Myla, which sits next to the main E-40 motorway. Their apartment block was damaged in the initial fighting, the top two floors being burned out after being hit by cannon fire from tanks.

The couple were originally from the Donbas and had fled their home in Kramatorsk following the Russian invasion. ‘Unfortunately the war followed us here,’ says Serhii. ‘Fate was not kind.’

They were on a forest path when Luiba, 65, triggered the explosive. She suffered catastrophic injuries to her legs.

Her husband applied tourniquets using the straps of his rucksack and material from his trousers and called an ambulance. But the first responders were reluctant to go to the site of the tragedy because of the risk of other booby traps. Serhii had to carry a stretcher and give out painkillers himself.

Luiba was finally rescued by a policeman who sang to her as they carried her away. But she died of blood loss in the ambulance on the way to hospital.

‘We had passed that particular path several times without incident,’ Serhii said. ‘I feel such guilt about it. If we had been more careful Luiba would still be here.’ The incident further demonstrates the brutal absurdity of this conflict.

He showed me a family photo album in which there were pictures of his father, a decorated veteran who had fought in the Red Army all the way from the Soviet Union to Austria in the Second World War.

The Halo Trust is now conducting a surveillance operation in the forest where Luiba died.

Donate here to the Mail Force Ukraine Appeal

TO MAKE A DONATION ONLINE 

Donate at www.mailforcecharity.co.uk/donate 

To add Gift Aid to a donation – even one already made – complete an online form found here: mymail.co.uk/ukraine

Via bank transfer, please use these details:

Account name: Mail Force Charity

Account number: 48867365

Sort code: 60-00-01

TO MAKE A DONATION VIA TEXT

To donate £10, text HELP to 70115 To donate £20, text AID to 70115 Texts cost either £10 or £20 plus a standard network rate message. 100% of the donation goes to charity. 

TO MAKE A DONATION VIA PHONE

Call 0300 12345 77 and follow the instructions to make your donation. A small fee will be deducted by the payment processing platforms when you pay by debit or credit card. 

TO MAKE A DONATION VIA CHEQUE

Make your cheque payable to ‘Mail Force’ and post it to: Mail Newspapers Ukraine Appeal, GFM, 42 Phoenix Court, Hawkins Road, Colchester, Essex CO2 8JY

TO MAKE A DONATION FROM THE US

You can donate via CAF America at: https://donations.cafamerica.org/mail-force/

Or 

US readers can donate to the appeal via a bank transfer to Associated Newspapers or by sending checks to dailymail.com HQ at 51 Astor Place (9th floor), New York, NY 10003.

Checks in the US need to be made out to ‘CAF America’ and have ‘Mail Force Ukraine Appeal’ in the memo. 

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