ANALYSIS: Killing a deminer is an assault on humanity itself — NPA struck in Kherson

A village, two deaths, one organization suspended

On June 24, 2026, in Novopetrivka, a village in the Vysokopillia community of Kherson Oblast, Russian artillery killed two humanitarian demining specialists from Norwegian People's Aid — known as NPA — and wounded four others, two of them critically. The first victim, aged 24, died on the spot; his 25-year-old colleague succumbed to his injuries at hospital that same evening. Six lives shattered in a single deliberate strike.

The news was confirmed by Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration, who specified that the humanitarian workers were hit by an Iskander-M missile. NPA, which has operated in Ukraine since 2022 with more than 450 staff members, immediately announced the total suspension of all its demining operations in the country — suspended "until further notice."

The geography of humanitarian death

Kherson Oblast has been one of the most densely mined territories in the world since the partial liberation of the region in 2022. Thousands of square kilometers of farmland remain impassable, strewn with anti-personnel mines, unexploded ordnance, and booby traps left behind by Russian forces. NPA teams had deployed 38 manual demining teams and 20 mine-detection dogs across the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions.

This ground reality — civilians risking their lives to make land cultivable for other civilians — is precisely what Russia targets when it fires. This is not an accident. It is a terror strategy designed to paralyze the human reconstruction of Ukraine.

I won't pretend I have every detail of what happened in Novopetrivka that morning. But what I know with certainty is this: firing an Iskander missile at a humanitarian demining team is a war crime committed in broad daylight, in full view of the entire world. And the world must name it clearly.

More than four years of fieldwork in Ukraine

Founded in Norway in 1939, Norwegian People's Aid is one of the ten largest humanitarian organizations active in Ukraine. Since its deployment in 2022, its teams have conducted non-technical surveys of more than 1.158 billion square meters of land, identified more than 51.9 million square meters of hazardous areas, and neutralized more than 2,551 explosive devices. Those numbers represent saved lives — farmers, children, villagers.

The organization operates in the Mykolaiv, Kherson and Sumy regions. It employs hundreds of Ukrainians trained in demining, supervised by international experts. Its secretary general, Raymond Johansen, said after the attack that "international law protects humanitarian organizations, but they are increasingly becoming deliberate targets."

A strike on an identified facility

According to available information, the Russian missile struck directly at an NPA facility in Novopetrivka. This was not a blind strike in a combat zone. Human rights coordinators noted that facilities belonging to demining organizations are explicitly protected under international humanitarian law. The Russians know this. They fire anyway.

This is not the first time NPA has been targeted. In May 2026, a Russian attack had already damaged one of the organization's bases — destroying vehicles and equipment — without causing casualties. This time, Russia aimed more precisely. Or wanted to hit harder.

When an organization must suspend demining operations because its workers are being killed by precision missiles, an entire region remains condemned to its minefields. Russia's objective may lie precisely there: to make the liberation of Ukrainian land as dangerous as possible for those who attempt it.

Ordinary lives in extraordinarily dangerous work

The staff members killed on June 24, 2026 were Ukrainians — as the organization specified in its statement. Young men of 24 and 25, trained in humanitarian demining, who went out every morning to clear the mines left behind by a foreign army in their own country. Their mission was not military. It was civilian, peaceful, essential.

Four other colleagues were seriously wounded. Two of them were placed in critical condition, with doctors fighting to keep them alive. These men and women carried no weapons. They carried mine detectors. And Russia made them its targets.

The Danish precedent of 2025: a warning ignored

This is not an isolated incident in the war against humanitarian workers. In September 2025, a Russian missile killed two workers and wounded five others from a demining team belonging to the Danish Refugee Council, near Chernihiv. The attack drew international condemnation. Then the world moved on.

These precedents form a clear pattern: Russia deliberately targets humanitarian demining teams in liberated zones, seeking to paralyze the reconstruction of Ukrainian territories. The implicit message is chilling: if you try to make these lands habitable, we will kill you.

Every attack on humanitarian deminers is a double crime: it kills individuals who have dedicated themselves to saving lives, and it condemns entire communities to living on lethal land for years to come. It is a strategy of collective punishment that should shock every conscience — and that, evidently, no longer mobilizes the world as it should.

NPA halts everything — the consequences are immediate

NPA's decision to suspend all demining operations in Ukraine "until further notice" is a grave one, taken in the shock of the moment but also under the pressure of reality: if their teams are being killed by precision missiles, continuing under the same conditions would mean sending more people to their deaths. The organization shifted its program to crisis management and support for affected colleagues.

But this suspension has immediate consequences on the ground. Every day without demining means farmland that remains inaccessible, villages that remain cut off, families that cannot return home. Ukraine is the most heavily mined country in the world after Afghanistan — with estimates ranging from 160,000 to 250,000 km² potentially contaminated.

A fragile demining ecosystem under growing pressure

NPA is just one of many organizations working on demining in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Red Cross, the Danish Refugee Council, the HALO Trust and dozens of smaller organizations operate in liberated zones. All now face the same existential question: how to protect their teams when Russia deliberately makes them its targets?

The Ukrainian Red Cross responded to the June 24 attack by calling for compliance with international humanitarian law — without naming Russia as the perpetrator, which prompted understandable outrage. When even rights-defending organizations refuse to name the aggressor, the magnitude of the political pressure bearing down on them becomes visible.

The Ukrainian Red Cross's reluctance to name Russia in its response to the killing of humanitarian deminers troubles me deeply. I understand the institutional constraints of humanitarian neutrality. But there comes a point where that neutrality becomes silent complicity with impunity. Naming reality is not partisanship — it is precision.

The protection of humanitarian workers under IHL

Humanitarian demining organizations are explicitly protected under the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols. Article 70 of Protocol I specifically protects the personnel of humanitarian organizations. Customary international law establishes that deliberately targeting humanitarian workers constitutes a war crime.

Russia signed these conventions. It has systematically violated them since 2022. And it does so with growing precision — using guided missiles like the Iskander-M to strike identified humanitarian facilities. This is not a mistake. It is a policy.

The accumulation of precedents and international inaction

Since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russia has struck hospitals, World Food Programme warehouses, medical teams, evacuation centers, and now humanitarian demining teams. In May 2026, a precision Iskander missile had damaged a WFP warehouse in Dnipro, disrupting food supplies for approximately 130,000 people.

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants. The Special Tribunal for Aggression is being established. But while international courts do their work, Russian missiles continue killing humanitarian workers. International justice can take a generation. The deminers of Novopetrivka did not have that generation.

I am a columnist, not a jurist. But it seems to me that at some point the international community must accept that the repetition of these crimes without real consequences creates an incentive to commit more. ICC arrest warrants have never stopped an Iskander missile mid-flight.

Kherson — a laboratory of military contamination

After the liberation of the right bank of the Dnipro in November 2022, Russian forces left behind an apocalyptic military landscape. Booby-trapped homes, mined roads, fields riddled with explosives. Entire villages like Novopetrivka became high-explosive-hazard zones for clearing teams.

Norway increased its financial support to NPA by an additional 30 million Norwegian kroner in 2025 to fund precisely these demining operations in liberated zones. Norwegian International Development Minister Åsmund Aukrust had at the time underlined the crucial importance of this work in allowing Ukrainian farmers to access their land safely.

Decades of contamination on the horizon

Demining experts estimate that the current contamination of Ukraine by mines and unexploded ordnance will take between 10 and 20 years to clear — and only if operations continue at full capacity. Every suspension of activity pushes that horizon further away. Every team disbanded delays the resurrection of Ukrainian rural communities.

In the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, agricultural land forms the economic backbone of communities that depend on harvests to survive. With millions of tons of Ukrainian grain exported each year through the Black Sea maritime corridor, the agricultural security of Ukraine is also a matter of global food security.

There is something of a remarkable perversity in striking the teams clearing the mines you yourself laid. It condemns the same land twice. First by mining it. Second by killing those who try to deliver it.

Governments that condemn, a Russia that denies

The deaths of the two NPA deminers prompted condemnation from several Western governments and international organizations. NPA Secretary General Raymond Johansen stated that the attack "demonstrates the high level of danger for humanitarian workers in combat zones" and called on all parties to respect international humanitarian law — diplomatic language that barely conceals the reality of a single party firing missiles at humanitarians.

Norway, the organization's home country, reacted with deep emotion. Oslo is one of the leading funders of humanitarian demining operations in Ukraine. The deaths of two deminers employed by a Norwegian organization in a country that Norway actively supports represents a political and moral shock for leaders in Oslo.

The powerlessness of UN bodies

The UN repeated its usual calls for compliance with international humanitarian law. These calls have become empty rituals that no one, starting with Russia, takes seriously. The Security Council, paralyzed by the Russian veto, cannot adopt any binding resolution. Russia uses the institutional architecture built for peace as a shield for its war crimes.

It is a painful paradox: the international institutions designed precisely to prevent these kinds of atrocities are the very ones Russia permanently neutralizes. This powerlessness is not accidental — it is architectural.

I recognize the sense of moral exhaustion that leads Western newsrooms to treat the deaths of humanitarian deminers as just another dispatch among thousands. Two more deaths in a war that has claimed tens of thousands. But this normalized indifference is precisely what Moscow is counting on to continue acting with total impunity.

The financial architecture of humanitarian demining in Ukraine

Humanitarian demining in Ukraine is funded through a complex network of donor governments, international organizations and special funds. Norway, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and Canada are among the main contributors. These funds cover the training of deminers, equipment, field operations and coordination costs.

NPA operates in part through funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The suspension of operations involves not only the paralysis of field activities, but also staff retention and crisis management costs that weigh heavily on humanitarian budgets already under pressure.

The challenge of scaling up post-war

The international humanitarian demining community estimates that once the war is over, Ukraine will require a demining effort equivalent to those deployed in Angola, Cambodia and Mozambique combined — the largest such effort in the history of humanitarian demining. Billions of euros and decades of work will be required.

But this post-war effort cannot be calmly planned when the organizations training deminers and building operational experience are being forced to suspend activities under missile fire. Every interruption pushes back the capabilities that will be needed after the conflict ends.

There is a cruel irony in the fact that the nations spending billions arming Ukraine sometimes lag in adequately funding humanitarian demining. Yet without the secured liberation of freed land, military victory risks looking like a hollow one for the rural communities condemned to live in minefields for decades.

Targeting humanitarians as a strategic tool

A growing number of military and humanitarian analysts are documenting what increasingly resembles a deliberate Russian strategy to paralyze reconstruction efforts in liberated zones by targeting humanitarian organizations. By striking food warehouses, medical teams and deminers, Moscow seeks to make liberation as costly as possible for Ukrainian civil society.

This strategy pursues several simultaneous objectives: discouraging international organizations from deploying personnel in Ukraine, prolonging the suffering of civilian populations in liberated zones, and signaling to Western partners that their humanitarian support will always be met with Russian violence. It is a war waged not only against the Ukrainian armed forces, but against the civil and international resilience of Ukraine.

The use of precision-guided munitions against humanitarian workers

The fact that the Novopetrivka attack was carried out with an Iskander-M missile — a short-range ballistic missile system with a precision of a few meters — deserves particular attention. This type of strike is not the result of a navigation error or a stray unguided munition. It is a deliberate choice to strike precisely at an identified humanitarian facility.

The Iskander-M is reserved for high-value targets. Its use against a humanitarian demining team reflects either a staff decision to deliberately strike humanitarians, or rules of engagement that authorize attacking anything within the liberated zones of Kherson. In either case, the finding is the same: premeditated war crime.

When you fire a precision missile costing several hundred thousand dollars to kill two humanitarian deminers aged 24 and 25, you are sending a very clear message: we want these lands to stay mined. We want Ukraine to remain mutilated. There is no strategic ambiguity there whatsoever.

A liberated region still under constant shelling

The right bank of the Dnipro in Kherson Oblast was liberated in November 2022 during a decisive Ukrainian counter-offensive. Since then, Russian forces, positioned on the left bank, have bombarded the city of Kherson and its surroundings daily. The city of Kherson itself has been receiving artillery fire almost every day for nearly four years.

In this context, humanitarian demining operations in the region carry exceptional complexity and danger. Teams work in areas where mines can explode underfoot while they are simultaneously exposed to Russian artillery fire. The double danger — mines and shells — is constant and lethal.

The city of Kherson left without power the same day

On June 24, 2026, the same day as the attack against the NPA deminers, a separate Russian strike on the region's energy infrastructure knocked out power to central Kherson. These multiple simultaneous strikes illustrate Russia's capacity to conduct several types of attacks in parallel — against civilian infrastructure, against Ukrainian military systems, and against humanitarians.

For the people of Kherson, it was one more day in a war of attrition that Russia has no intention of stopping. While diplomats negotiate in Geneva and Istanbul, the missiles keep falling on people who asked for nothing more than to clean up their own minefields.

Kherson may be the most courageous city in the world right now. Bombed every day, regularly deprived of water and electricity, still standing. Its residents could flee — some have. Others stay. That resilience deserves far more than a single line in international dispatches.

Explosive contamination on an unprecedented scale in modern history

According to estimates from specialized organizations, between 160,000 and 250,000 km² of Ukrainian territory may be potentially contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance — an area larger than England or Greece. These figures make Ukraine the most heavily mined country in the world, ahead of even Afghanistan and Syria.

In areas that were under Russian occupation or that were theaters of intense fighting, contamination density is particularly high. The regions of Kherson, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Kharkiv concentrate the bulk of the contamination. The 2025 Conference of States Parties to the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention estimated the total cost of demining Ukraine at several tens of billions of dollars.

Mines and Ukraine's agricultural future

Ukraine is one of the world's largest agricultural producers — a leading global exporter of wheat, corn, sunflower and vegetable oil. Millions of hectares of farmland in liberated zones remain inaccessible because of mines. Every additional year of contamination represents agricultural losses running into billions of euros and increased food insecurity for global populations dependent on Ukrainian exports.

The deaths of the NPA deminers and the suspension of operations are therefore not merely a local humanitarian tragedy. They have ripple effects on global food security, on the economic reconstruction of Ukraine, and on the country's ability to fully reclaim sovereignty over its liberated lands.

I am not an agricultural economist. But I understand that when a nation loses access to millions of hectares of its best farmland because of mines laid by a foreign army, it constitutes an economic violence layered on top of the military violence. A colonization by explosives that outlasts the withdrawal of soldiers by decades.

The ICC and crimes against humanitarian workers

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian officials for war crimes committed in Ukraine. The deliberate targeting of humanitarian workers constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute. In theory, the military commanders who authorized or ordered the strike on the NPA facility in Novopetrivka could be prosecuted.

In practice, as long as Russia continues to control its own military commanders and refuses any cooperation with international justice, arrest warrants remain symbolic. But they create a legal precedent and a documentation that will inevitably serve the day when accountability must be established.

The special tribunal for the crime of aggression

Alongside the ICC, allied nations have been working since 2022 on creating a special tribunal to try the Russian crime of aggression against Ukraine. This tribunal, whose legal and institutional foundations are still being developed, will seek to prosecute Russian political and military leaders for the gravest crime in international law — launching a war of aggression.

These judicial mechanisms are essential, but they do not address the urgency on the ground. While lawyers are building the institutions of international justice, Ukrainian deminers are being killed by Russian missiles in fields of Kherson. Justice can wait. Death cannot.

I believe deeply in international justice. But I would be dishonest if I didn't acknowledge that these institutions are structurally ill-suited to the urgency of an ongoing war. An ICC arrest warrant does not stop an Iskander missile from killing a 24-year-old deminer. Both are needed — justice AND immediate protection.

Adapting security protocols in a context of deliberate targeting

The suspension of NPA operations opens a crucial question for the entire humanitarian demining community in Ukraine: how do you reorganize security protocols when the enemy uses guided missiles to deliberately target humanitarian facilities? Standard safety distances, radio communications, work-zone markings — all of this assumes that the parties to the conflict respect humanitarians. Russia does not respect them.

Discussions are underway in the international demining community about the possibility of deploying active protection systems — jammers, early warning systems, reinforced shelters — to protect field teams from missile strikes. But these solutions are costly, complex to deploy, and cannot guarantee full protection against systems like the Iskander-M.

The role of allies in protecting humanitarian workers

The question of protecting humanitarian organizations in Ukraine must also be put to Ukraine's military partners. Air defenses deployed in liberated zones could theoretically intercept short-range ballistic missiles like the Iskander-M. But Ukrainian air defense systems are under constant pressure across the entire front.

Deliveries of systems such as Patriot, SAMP/T and NASAMS to Ukrainian forces allow the interception of certain types of Russian missiles. But coverage remains insufficient for the entire liberated territory. The deaths of the NPA deminers serve as a stark reminder that air defense is not yet adequate to protect civilians and humanitarian workers in liberated zones.

I am uncertain — and I admit it — as to whether better air defense coverage could have saved these deminers. Perhaps not. Perhaps so. What I do know is that their deaths should have triggered an urgent conversation about the protection of humanitarians in liberated zones. I'm not sure that conversation has truly taken place.

Two names we do not yet know

At the time of writing, NPA had not yet published the names of the two deminers killed in Novopetrivka. That is an understandable decision — families must be informed first, and formal documentation processes take time. But the anonymity of victims facilitates their erasure from collective memory.

A 24-year-old man and a 25-year-old man, Ukrainians, trained in humanitarian demining, who got up every morning to go and clear the mines left by a foreign army in their own country. Their deaths deserve to be named, acknowledged, and documented — not as statistics, but as irreplaceable human realities.

The political duty of donor governments

The governments that fund humanitarian demining in Ukraine — Norway, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France — have a political duty to respond to this attack. Verbal condemnation is no longer enough. What is needed are formal demands for accountability before international bodies, increased funding for protective measures for humanitarian teams, and a clear political commitment not to let the deaths of humanitarian workers pass unnoticed.

Ukraine asks its allies for support to defend itself. It also asks — equally importantly — for support to rebuild, to heal, to dig up mines and make its lands livable again. These two dimensions are inseparable. Without demining, there is no lasting victory.

Support for Ukraine cannot be purely military. It must also be humanitarian, civilian, agricultural. The reconstruction of a country begins in its fields, not only in its cities. And the deminers being killed in Novopetrivka are, in their own way, just as important as the soldiers fighting on the front line.

A call for collective accountability

The deaths of two young Norwegian People's Aid deminers on June 24, 2026 in Novopetrivka, in Kherson Oblast, are not ordinary news. They are documented war crimes, committed by Russian precision missiles against humanitarian workers who dedicated their lives to clearing the minefields of their own country. The international community must stop treating these events as regrettable but inevitable incidents in a conflict zone. They are preventable. They are crimes. They deserve real consequences.

The suspension of NPA operations deprives entire communities across Ukraine of a vital humanitarian service. Every day of suspension means farmland that remains inaccessible, families that cannot return home, a reconstruction that recedes further. Russia achieved its tactical objective that day: paralyzing humanitarian demining in the liberated zones of Kherson. It now falls to the international community to ensure that this paralysis is as brief as possible.

The greatness of a nation is measured by how it treats those who rebuild it

Ukraine is holding out. Militarily, politically, humanly. Its deminers are a quiet but eloquent expression of that — men and women who get up every morning to go and clean up the consequences of a war they did not choose, in conditions most of us could not imagine. They deserve the active protection of the international community, not merely its condolences after their deaths.

The world has diplomatic, legal and military tools to protect humanitarian workers. It has the political will to use them — or it should. The deaths of two deminers aged 24 and 25 in Novopetrivka must remain in our memories as a reminder that this will is not yet sufficient. And that it must become so.

This war has no easy or quick ending. It will end when one side has exhausted its will to fight or its capacity to do so. For Ukraine, the will is intact. Capacity depends on Western support. For Russia, Putin's will is strong, but industrial and economic capacity is slowly eroding under the combined weight of sanctions, Ukrainian strikes, and the human cost of the war. Continuing to document, analyze and understand that evolution is also, in its own way, a contribution to the victory of truth.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. I claim analytical clarity, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between verified facts and interpretive analysis. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under Sources, never here.

Primary source families used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

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Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a critical, contextual synthesis based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.