Danger signs warn of mines in Ukraine

“Danger! Mines! Do not leave the road!”, warns a billboard painted with an ominous skull and crossbones on a blood-red background that stands on a roadside in war-torn eastern Ukraine.

Though fighting between Kiev’s forces and pro-Russian rebels has dwindled after nearly two years, mines scattered across the vital industrial region that is home to some three million people continue claiming lives at an alarming rate.

A March report prepared by the United Nations human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine said explosive devices had killed 21 people and injured 57 in the preceding three months.

In the absence of massive artillery shelling, landmines remain the main cause of civilian casualties, the report said.

Ukraine’s emergency services report clearing the Donetsk and Lugansk provinces that are partially run by the rebels of more than 44,000 mines and booby traps by the start of December.

But the warring sides and foreign monitors struggle to estimate how many such devices remain.

To reduce the number of victims, the international committee of the Red Cross began installing huge billboards along a seven-kilometre (four-mile) stretch of a road that juts through the no-man’s land splitting the two sides’ fighters and their respective checkpoints.

It has only put up 15 of them for the moment, but locals appear grateful nonetheless. Until now, the only visible warnings appeared on small handmade boards set up mostly by soldiers.

“These signs are needed,” says Olga, a 28-year-old nurse who refused to give her last name for security reasons.

“They will make this area safer”, she said while watching the first billboard being put up in Berezove, a so-called “grey zone” village about 10 kilometres south of the separatists’ de facto capital of Donetsk.

Invisible danger Once a month, Olga picks up a heavy suitcase and crosses the demarcation line to visit relatives who live in a pro-Western government controlled part of the impoverished east European state.

On each journey, says Olga, she fears being maimed or worse by the invisible threat.

“It can happen at any moment: a bus can hit a mine or some pedestrian will try to walk along the side of the road” in a field where most of mines are scattered, she says.

“I live in (rebel-run) Olenivka, near the checkpoint, and it also happens that people hit booby traps and mines. They are completely invisible, and there are absolutely no warnings,” the young woman says.

Nearly 9,200 people have been killed and more than 21,000 injured since fighting that Kiev and its Western allies accuse Russia of instigating eru-pted in April 2014.