In their counter-offensive, the Ukrainians are making little progress, partly because of the massively expanded defense systems of the Russian troops. Recently, heavily mined areas have been reported. The Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Resnikov spoke of millions of explosive devices at the front in the British “Guardian” on Monday. There are minefields stretching over hundreds of kilometers (source here).
The Ukrainian troops also use thermal imaging cameras to detect these explosive devices, as the television channel CNN reports on its website (source here). Accordingly, the cameras are placed on commercially available drones and sent into the sky at dusk. They discover dozens of heat sources.
The explanation: the mines absorb heat from the summer sun, which they also saved at sunset. And that makes them visible to the cameras.
Paul McCann from the British demining organization Halo told CNN that these heat traces are particularly visible at dawn and dusk, if they differ greatly from the outside temperature. According to McCann, this method has already been used by his organization’s experts in Angola, where it has shown promise.
A drone team told the TV station what the mining situation was like in Ukraine. “As we advanced into a line of trees, we found up to 53 booby traps,” explains soldier Olexsandr. “These aren’t made of a grenade, but grenades upon grenades – we call them a bouquet”.
