On December 5, 2025, the third annual Demine Ukraine Forum was held in Kyiv, where important achievements in the field of returning agricultural land to Ukrainian farmers were announced.
Thanks to the state program for compensation for the cost of demining, agricultural producers managed to return about 10 thousand hectares of land to use. This was announced during the event by the Minister of Economy, Environment and Agriculture Oleksiy Sobolev.
Expansion of the support program
The minister announced plans to scale up the existing program. In the near future, the compensation mechanism will be available not only to farms, but also to households. In the future, it is planned to involve the Land Bank plots in the program.
“Despite unfavorable forecasts at the beginning of the year, we will reach the 2024 indicators,” Sobolev noted, emphasizing the importance of international support in this process.
International partnership: $1.5 billion for demining
The key factor in the success of the program was the financial support of international partners. The total contribution to humanitarian demining in Ukraine reached $1.5 billion. Among the most active donors are: the United States, the Howard Buffett Foundation, Switzerland, Norway, Germany, the European Union, the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan and France.
The UNDP Resident Representative in Ukraine, Auke Lutsma, emphasized that mine action is not an expense, but an investment in the people of Ukraine, its economy and future prosperity.
Innovations from partners
The Demine Ukraine Forum 2025, which brought together over 500 participants, paid special attention to technological innovations in the field of demining. Ukrainian and international companies presented advanced developments that can significantly increase the effectiveness of mine action.
Mykola Zentsev, founder of Andromeda Group, a Major General of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the reserve, who took part in the event, shared his impressions of international cooperation in the field of demining:
“Humanitarian demining is not just a technique or methodology, it is a holistic system: from political support to field operations. And this conference showed that such a system is finally taking shape.
Approximately 174 thousand square kilometers of land in Ukraine is contaminated with mines – this is one of the largest problems of this kind in the world. The scale of contamination is so great that it is simply impossible to do without the involvement of private companies. We are seeing a paradigm shift: private operators are no longer just contractors, they are becoming full-fledged participants in the international humanitarian demining system.”
Zentsev also noted the most interesting technological innovations on the market: “Given also the results of the UMAC 2025 conference in Tokyo, I was most impressed by the Compressed Air Demining system from the Japanese company IOS, which uses compressed air to neutralize mines. Also, VR simulators from Safer Access – this allows you to train sappers in realistic conditions without any risk. And long GPR antennas from Isanagi, which provide a much better scanning depth, which is critical for detecting large aerial bombs.”
In addition, Deputy Minister of Economy, Environment and Agriculture Igor Bezkaravayny presented the GRIT system at the forum, which works on the basis of Palantir technologies and helps determine priority areas for demining.
The system creates digital twins of land, analyzes large data sets and identifies areas where small bottlenecks block access to much larger areas that could be transferred to farmers.
“GRIT does not change the mine action process, but makes it smarter, more accurate and more manageable. The very structure of IMAS (International Mine Action Standards) remains unchanged,” Bezkaravayny emphasized.
The scale of the problem
Despite the achieved results, the amount of work remains enormous. About a quarter of the territory of Ukraine — more than 13.9 million hectares — has been affected by hostilities and requires inspection for the presence of explosive devices.
At the same time, since the beginning of the full-scale war, the demining units of the Security and Defense Forces of Ukraine have already cleared more than 1 million explosive devices.
Demine Ukraine Forum 2025 is organized by the Ministry of Economy, Environment and Agriculture of Ukraine together with the Humanitarian Demining Center with the support of UNDP and funding from the governments of Norway and Niedрландів.