When Sergiy, a 47-year-old construction worker, got out of bed on a Sunday morning in this small town in northeastern Ukraine, he discovered a chilling new hazard in a war filled with them: He had woken up in a minefield.
He had heard a rocket land near his home around 1 in the morning but thought little of it. There had been plenty of rockets since Russian forces invaded in late February. The thuds, crumps and blasts had become a cruel but familiar soundtrack to those who stayed behind, along with the acidic smell the weapons left in the air.
But what landed in his yard was a new weapon for the town’s residents to add to their growing lexicon of destruction: They knew the Smerch, the Grad, the Hurricane — and now they were introduced to the PTM-1S land mine, a type of scatterable munition.