Russia-Ukraine war unravels decades of landmine treaty protections

In August 2020, a twelve-year-old girl named Raheela Bibi was playing outside with her siblings in Pakistan when a landmine detonated beneath her. Both her hands were amputated in the blast. Her sister's leg was shattered. Her brother lost sight in one eye. Three years later, when Raheela spoke to journalists about her life, she described the grinding difficulty of doing homework without hands—and her refusal to stop trying. Her story is one thread in a much larger unraveling.

Landmines are engineered weapons of a particular cruelty. They are designed not to kill soldiers outright but to maim them, reasoning that an injured combatant drains an enemy's resources far more than a corpse does. In peacetime, however, this calculus inverts entirely. Mines become indiscriminate killers of civilians, especially children, who stumble into fields long after the soldiers have gone home. In 2025 alone, more than five thousand people—the vast majority of them noncombatants—were killed or injured by landmines or unexploded ordnance. In South Sudan, nine out of every ten victims were children.

For nearly three decades, the world had tried to solve this problem through law. In 1997, representatives from more than 120 countries gathered and signed the Ottawa Treaty, a sweeping agreement to ban anti-personnel mines altogether. The treaty took legal force in 1999, by which time roughly twenty-five thousand people were dying or being maimed by mines each year. One hundred sixty-six nations eventually ratified it. But four major powers did not: China, India, Russia, and the United States. Russia, crucially, never signed at all.

Then came February 2022, and Russia's full invasion of Ukraine. What followed was a cascade of withdrawals that has shattered the treaty's architecture. Five European NATO countries that border Russia—Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—all withdrew from the Ottawa Treaty in 2025. Ukraine, though not a NATO member, also withdrew, though the legal effect of that withdrawal is suspended until the war ends. The precedent is stark and alarming. These are not distant nations in conflict over resources or ideology. These are European democracies, members of the Western alliance, deciding that the humanitarian protections they had embraced for a generation were now liabilities.

Ukraine's justification was blunt: Russia has never ratified the treaty and has deployed mines across Ukrainian territory with no legal constraint. "We cannot remain bound under conditions when the enemy has no restrictions," said Roman Kostenko, secretary of Ukraine's parliamentary committee on national security. Ukraine itself has begun laying mines, though on a far smaller scale than Russia's deployment. According to the United Nations Mine Action Service, as of mid-2025, approximately one quarter of Ukraine's entire territory was contaminated with mines and unexploded ordnance. This includes both Ukrainian-controlled areas and Russian-occupied zones in the east and southeast. Since the invasion began in February 2022, more than eleven hundred fifty Ukrainian civilians have been killed or injured by mines and explosive remnants of war. The estimated cost of fully clearing the country of mines over the next decade: just under thirty-five billion dollars.

Poland has been particularly explicit about its intentions. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has stated repeatedly that his country must be able to rapidly mine its eastern border with Russia if conflict erupts. The state-owned defense company Belma has been contracted to manufacture anti-personnel mines in large quantities. Lithuania has announced it will resume both the production and purchase of landmines. Finland's military has taken a slightly different tack, insisting that if mines must be laid, they should be deployed "responsibly"—with accurate maps of their positions and clear demining plans. But Simone Wisotzki, a researcher at the Leibniz Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt, points out that even these newer mines, equipped with integrated sensors and smart technologies, present their own problems. They are harder to remove and destroy. And in practice, mines are always laid in areas civilians inhabit. They remain there long after the war ends, injuring civilians disproportionately.

Wisotzki sees this moment as a dangerous inflection point. "This is a precedent that European states, of all countries, have set," she told Deutsche Welle. "Other parties to the Ottawa Treaty facing equally extreme situations in times of conflict could take the same step. We would then have to deal with more withdrawals, which would undermine the legitimacy of the entire treaty." Her concern is not abstract. The broader landscape of arms control has already collapsed. In recent years, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty expired. The New Start nuclear reduction agreement lapsed. The Treaty on Open Skies was terminated. Russia withdrew from the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty. What remains of humanitarian arms control—the agreements meant to protect civilians from the worst weapons—is now fragmenting too. The Ottawa Treaty was, in Wisotzki's words, "the only area that could still be said to be working." And that is no longer the case.