Land mines are one of the scourges of modern warfare.  Under international law, parties are supposed to lay their mines in an orderly fashion and to mark and keep track of them; they’re also supposed to construct mines with metallic materials that allow them to be detected.  Instead, in many armed conducts over the past three decades warring parties have grown accustomed to spraying plastic mines indiscriminately, often by air, to spread fear and confusion, using them less as weapons of war than as tools of terror.

As a result, even when hostilities cease, large swathes of territory retain active mines that continue to explode and kill and maim civilians.  This can go on for years, even decades, leaving the population in former war zones in a state of perpetual fear and unable to resume a “normal” life.

The current war in Ukraine is no exception.  After barely six months of aggression, government forces have encountered Russian mines in high concentrations surrounding major cities like Kiev.  With the invasion stalled, Zelensky’s government has begun seeking international assistance to identify and recapture these mined areas  And for the first time in history, the advanced mapping and detection capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles are being called upon to speed the demining effort.

Demining is dangerous labor-intensive work and is made more difficult by an inability to distinguish mines from harmless underground clutter.  Currently, many governments and their demining crews use robotic land rovers equipped with magnetometers to try to detect underground mines. The land robots work well on relatively flat and even terrain but are largely useless for detecting mines in areas already filled with rubble or other obstructions; and magnetometers can’t detect landmines made of plastic.

A Canadian firm, Draganfly, is providing Zelensky’s forces with a small fleet of drones to assist the government’s demining effort.  In theory, the drones’ advanced sensor imaging technology will be able to detect underground mines, metallic or not, based on their shape.  And with improved spotting and video confirmation, mine digging and removal crews can clear away mines at a faster rate. Right now, though, the drones operational advantage is still largely theoretical.  Draganfly is still, in the process of feeding mine images into its software’s  machine learning algorithm.  How efficiently the drones will function in practice remains unknown.

Still, it’s a pioneering effort that could have major implications for ongoing demining efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and in dozens of other recently concluded armed conflicts where civilians continue to die at a rate of nearly 8,000 annually.  The Biden administration, anxious to demilitarize the war in Ukraine and compel an early settlement. has just committed $89 million to demining operations in Ukraine.  It’s the latest example of how drones, even in the midst of a bloody war, can be redeployed toward reducing the level of violence and establishing the semblance of a spirit of peace.