Russia’s new depravity: Wrapping deadly mines in rags to drop on Ukraine

When she leaves home every day in Kherson, Natalia Sergienko is never sure if she will come back alive. For her and every inhabitant of this Ukrainian port city, a new lethal threat lies in wait: hundreds of disguised landmines systematically seeded onto pavements, sports fields and bus stations by Russian drones.

Moscow’s forces, situated just over a kilometre from the centre of Kherson on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River, have intensified their campaign against the city by routinely deploying two novel types of booby trap: so-called “rag mines” wrapped in clothing or textiles, and tiny anti-personnel devices known as “gingerbread mines”, which are the size of an ice hockey puck and can blow off an adult’s leg.

The devices, scattered randomly by small first-person view (FPV) drones, are the latest evolution of a Kremlin strategy to harness the ubiquity of cheap unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to bring war to the heart of civilian populations.

It is a lethal tool of harassment whose threat to mainland Europe, and potentially the UK, was underlined last week when a Russian Shahed-type drone slammed into a Romanian apartment block as Moscow tests Nato’s defences and appetite for confrontation.

‘Constant danger’

For Sergienko, a 37-year-old community worker and widowed mother, the threat posed by the drones and their insidious cargoes is a “constant danger” which permeates daily life in Kherson, whose pre-war population of 280,000 has shrunk to less than 70,000 since Russia’s 2022 invasion left it on the war’s frontline.

After being forced to withdraw back across the Dnipro in November that year, Vladimir Putin’s forces have effectively besieged Kherson, targeting its citizens in a so-called “human safari” by using drones to stalk and drop munitions on them – a tactic now evolved to scatter landmines among the city’s playgrounds, apartment blocks and ruins.

As if to emphasise the pernicious nature of the threat, a drone-carried device detonated outside Sergienko’s home in the middle of her interview with The i Paper for this story.

“The mining happens almost every second day but the danger is constant. The only time we get relief is if it is overcast and they don’t have good visibility, that’s the only quiet time,” Sergienko said.

“The drones are just like flies here; they burn cars every day, drop them on cyclists, drop them on ordinary people. Nothing is sacred. This is a terror campaign against civilians. They don’t have any particular targets, other than to kill or terrify as many people as possible.”

“When we leave our house every day, we never know if we’ll ever come back,” she added.

Ukraine’s most dangerous city

It’s difficult to ascertain the precise figures for the casualties from these mines, which first began to be used in April. But according to the UN humanitarian monitoring mission for Ukraine, some 26 civilians in Kherson were killed and 201 injured by Russian munitions in April – by far the highest total of any Ukrainian city.

According to social media posts and testimony from civil aid workers like Natalia, at least a dozen of those casualties have come from disguised mines in the last six weeks. For Sergienko, the toll comes very close to home.

Last month, an elderly woman who lives two blocks away picked up a priyanik or gingerbread mine – named because their shape resembles a traditional east European ginger biscuit – without realising what it was. “The lady’s dog found the priyanik, perhaps thinking it was a toy, and bit on it. Neither of them survived,” Sergienko said.

These mines, which contain about 30g of plastic explosive and cannot be deactivated, are commonly wrapped in a camouflage material, making them extremely difficult to spot if dropped in grass or scrubland. A woman was killed after stepping on one such device while walking across a football field, in one of several incidents in recent weeks.

There are similar stories about the havoc wrought by the rag mines. These larger devices are wrapped in material or clothing – such as women’s dresses – and tend to be dropped on streets or near housing.

The intention of the disguise appears to be either to make the mines appear innocuous to oncoming vehicles until it is too late or to encourage people to pick them up – often with fatal consequences. “It looks like an object wrapped in a rag,” said Yaroslav Shanko, who heads the Kherson City Military Administration. “The enemy uses it to target both people and equipment.

Glimpse of a future war

The experience of Khersonians is also a terrifying glimpse of how a future European war against Russia could be fought against a foe apparently unconcerned about drawing any distinction between civilians and combatants.

As one western security official put it last week: “There is abundant evidence from Ukraine that Russia has no compunction about targeting civilian infrastructure and civilians themselves to achieve its war aims. There is no reason to think they would not adopt similar tactics in a conflict with Nato.”

Natalia, who works with a charity distributing donated aid and medicines, is only able to go outside with any regularity because she is equipped with a drone detector – a clunky electronic device- about the size and shape of an old-fashioned transistor radio, which sounds an alarm if a Russian FPV drone is detected nearby.

It affords her and her colleagues from Hope for Ukraine a degree of security, sending them scurrying for cover when activated.

But it is far from full-proof. The fact that Russian attackers frequently change the frequencies and software used to control the drones means the detectors must also be regularly updated or replaced at a cost of about £350 a time – a figure beyond the reach of most Ukrainians.

The detectors are also rendered useless by the growing use of drones that are controlled via a fibre optic cable linked to the controller, making those UAVs impervious to jamming or detection.

“The detector saves lives but it also has limitations… It means the danger is always there for someone,” Sergienko said.

‘Our children have to think like adults’

Sergienko’s husband was killed in a car accident before the war. After the invasion, she and her son, 11-year-old Illiya, had to abandon their home on the occupied left bank of the Dnipro and now live in a flat in Kherson, where she helps to look after a disabled relative.

Every few weeks, someone she knows decides to leave the city, Sergienko said. But earlier this year, a Russian drone seeded the city’s long-distance bus station with mines – meaning that even leaving Kherson is freighted with danger.

She said that while she understands others’ decisions to leave, she has neither the desire nor the funds to move elsewhere in Ukraine out of the range of Putin’s drones. At the same time, she feels anger and sorrow at having to raise her child in a warzone, where the idea of going out to play comes freighted with an unacceptable risk of death or injury.

She said: “I can’t just leave this place because I understand that leaving Kherson means minus one volunteer and minus dozens of people being helped, maybe even hundreds of people and soldiers being helped.

“My son understands the danger that is here. He does remote schooling, and in every lesson, they are taught what not to hold and where not to walk. Our children have to think like adults, even though they are young.”

“It is very hard – I sometimes blame myself for not going, for not taking my child to civilisation. He doesn’t have a normal life where he could study physically at school, not online. Where he could develop with other kids,” she said. “But we are here to help people.”

‘Cowards’

In the meantime, she will carry on as other Kherson residents do – living an existence as quasi-fugitives in their own city while caught in a cruel limbo, monitoring the skies for Russian drones and the ground for their deadly cargoes.

Asked what she thinks of the men who pilot these machines and their commanders, Natalia does not mince her words.

“They are immoral. They are cowards who do not fight against armies; they fight against civilians. Their strategy is basically to make Ukrainians extinct. We won’t let them succeed.”