Land mines return to Europe as front-line states fear Russian invasion

[dalton99a]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/02/23/russia-nato-landmine-borders-trump/

https://archive.ph/7tL3P

Land mines return to Europe as front-line states fear Russian invasion
As policymakers reckon with Russia’s advances in Ukraine and Trump’s comments about defending NATO, the tools of 20th-century warfare are coming back in vogue
By Michael Birnbaum
February 23, 2024 at 4:42 p.m. EST

MUNICH — With former president Donald Trump encouraging Russia to attack NATO territory and U.S. support for Ukraine flagging, some of the nations that border Russia are looking for ways to harden their defenses, considering land mines and other technologies from ancient wars in a bid to blunt a Kremlin attack.

Two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, countries such as the Baltic states and Finland warn that a threat to their own territory may be just over the horizon, with some intelligence agencies saying the Kremlin could make such an attempt within a decade. Now they are taking lessons from their enemy’s robust defense lines in Ukraine, noting that Russia’s system of minefields, concertina wire and trenches made it all but impossible for Kyiv’s forces to advance last summer.

European states are still clamoring for F-35 fighter jets and space-age weapons, but the renewed interest and investment in century-old tactics is the latest example of how Russia’s war in Ukraine is upending long-held assumptions about how to defend NATO territory, with a revived focus on stopping tanks and mobile artillery. And though policymakers say they are still confident that NATO would come to their defense, they add that Trump’s rhetoric makes it more important than ever to be able to hold their own for as long as they can.

Nowhere have the choices been starker than in the discussion about land mines, as militaries weigh their low-cost ability to slow tanks and buy time for NATO rescuers against the risk to future generations of their own citizens. Land mines come in many forms, but the cheapest and simplest anti-personnel variant, once laid, can pose a hazard decades after a conflict ends. Mines and other explosive remnants of war killed or injured at least 12 civilians a day globally in 2022, many of them children, according to the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor.

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[Igel]

1. It's cheap and it seems to work.

And prevents Buchas and Mariupols.

They can continue to kill the occasional person for years after the conflict ends--if they're not confined to well defined places like buffer strips along borders. Then again, at 12 civilians a day, you can calculate how long it would take to equal the thousands of civilians killed in Mariupol, the hundreds in Bucha--let's ignore the soldiers killed by lowering the costs of invasion in the first place, making it less of a problem for the attacker.

During those hundreds of years of being buried and killing one or two dozen per year, the landmines would spontaneously fail, mostly just becoming inert without a lot of work to make them explode, so that they wouldn't be a danger for hundreds of years. Assuming no demining efforts were done, of course.

It's all about location, location, location.

[sarisataka]

2. How quickly opinions change

When you see a threat to your own country.

[Polybius]

3. +100

This!