'You don't survive that' Sappers dice with death to clear mines

Oleksandr Slyusar, a Ukrainian sapper with a ready smile, had spent the past 30 hours under Russian shelling in the recently liberated village of Staromaiorske in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. A rocket fired at them from a Grad system had peppered the legs and back of a fellow landmine-clearer with shrapnel.

- Daniel Boffey

Slyusar, 38, had taken his friend west to hospital in Zaporizhzhia city that morning, before arriving back at a secret military base.

He was preparing to brief an assault unit heading to the frontlines on what perils were awaiting them. "I have just come from the shit," he said. Slyusar had back pain, but his commander in the 128th brigade could not afford for to him to take time to get treatment.

"On paper, our brigade has 30 sappers," Slyusar said as he took out a range of mines that had recently been made safe. "In reality, it is 13. As for those who are active at the moment, it is five. I inject myself with a painkiller every day. There are two mistakes a sapper generally makes: stepping on a mine and becoming a sapper."

The soldiers spearheading Ukraine's counteroffensive face minefields that are 15km deep. Countless further mines are being dug into Ukraine's soil, distributed from the air or blasted into position by rockets.

"Today, Ukraine is the most heavily mined country in the world," Ukraine's defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, told the Guardian. "Hundreds of kilometres of minefields, millions of explosive devices, in some parts of the frontline up to five mines per square metre."