Dramatic video footage shared on social media shows Ukrainian soldiers detonating an entire row of Russian landmines, deliberately placed in the center of a road.
The video, shared on Twitter by a former Kherson resident forced to flee their hometown, shows landmines stacked three high and as wide as a country road.
A Ukrainian soldier stands directly in front of the mines and next to a fuse, talking to other soldiers standing several feet away from him and discussing plans to clear the explosives.
The video footage was recorded on a cell phone.
The soldiers filming the video appear to be standing in an armored personnel vehicle, or another kind of military vehicle, and watch as another soldier lights the fuse and quickly runs away.
Toward the end of the clip, the soldiers can be seen hundreds of feet away from the landmines with their fingers in their ears. Once the fuse finally triggers the landmines, it causes a huge explosion in the distance.
“Detonation of Russian anti-tank mines, which were collected by Ukrainian sappers during road demining,” the “Special Kherson Cat” Twitter account posts.
Why Were the Mines Stacked This Way?
Social media accounts sharing the video can’t seem to agree on why the landmines were stacked in such a way.
Some speculate that Russians may have purposely left the landmines on the road to slow down Ukrainian advances.
However, it’s also possible that the Ukrainian soldiers deliberately stacked the landmines so that they could be more easily detonated in one go.
Landmines are designed to explode when placed in contact with a vehicle or person, meaning that quick and sudden movements can easily cause them to detonate.
If one landmine explodes in the presence of another, it can cause a chain effect that triggers all landmines at once.
In this video, it’s possible that Ukrainian soldiers deliberately placed the mines close to one another after clearing them during a road demining operation.
While placing the landmines in the road could seem counter-productive – in that it could make crossing the road more difficult in the future – there are at least two possibilities to consider.
First, the Ukrainian soldiers may have intended to cause damage to the road to restrict access by Russian forces. A more likely explanation, however, is that the Ukrainian soldiers simply wanted to ensure that the landmines were in clear view – and given that the mines explode upwards, it may not have caused so much damage to the road that crossing it in a tank would become particularly difficult.
Jack Buckby is 19FortyFive’s Breaking News Editor.
