For decades, borders seeded with antipersonnel mines divided the Soviet bloc from the West, deterring citizens from fleeing across the Iron Curtain.
At the end of the Cold War, the mines were painstakingly dug up along the long frontier of the collapsed bloc. Anti-mine campaigners, helped in their cause by Diana, Princess of Wales, pushed world leaders to hammer out a global treaty banning a deadly weapon that indiscriminately kills civilians.
Now, in yet another consequence of Moscow’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, five countries bordering Russia plan to revive the use of a weapon prohibited by most countries for more than a quarter of a century, hoping to strengthen their defenses against Russian attack.
Recent moves by Poland, the three Baltic States and Finland — and a vow by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — to quit a mine ban treaty that came into force in 1999 won’t result in any immediate surge in the use of antipersonnel mines. Formally leaving the treaty is a six-month process.
But the recent rush of countries rejecting a pillar of the post-Cold War order has outraged anti-mine campaigners.
“We are furious with these countries,” said Tamar Gabelnick, director of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which in 1997 won a Nobel Peace Prize for its work clearing antipersonnel weapons and its role as the driving force behind the Mine Ban Treaty, known as the Ottawa Convention.
“They know full well that this will do nothing to help them against Russia,” Ms. Gablenick said, dismissing a retreat from the global accord as “just political games” by officials trying to present themselves as defenders of national security.
Senior military officials in at least three of the five countries whose parliaments recently voted to withdraw from the treaty have said in the past that they saw little military utility in reviving antipersonnel mines. The weapons mostly kill civilians and offer limited defense against modern mechanized armies.
The war in Ukraine “changed everything,” said Veronika Honkasalo, a left-wing member of the Finnish Parliament who is opposed to leaving the treaty, a move supported by an overwhelming majority of her fellow legislators in a recent vote. Because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she added, “people got really scared because we have a 1,300-kilometer border with Russia and long history of war with our neighbor.”
Of the European countries that share a land border with Russia, only Norway has stayed steadfast in its commitment to the Mine Ban Treaty.
The treaty, according to the United Nations, led to the destruction of more than 55 million antipersonnel mines. The weapons were widely used in the Cold War era, in conflicts in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Myanmar and many other countries but continued to kill people long after fighting ended. Eighty percent of the casualties from antipersonnel mines are civilians, many of them children, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which estimates that the number of people killed or maimed each year has fallen to around 3,500 from more than 20,000 over the last two decades.
“It is a horrible weapon,” said Ms. Honkasalo, the Finnish legislator.
Public awareness in the West of the dangers posed by the mines rose sharply in the 1990s, in part as a result of Princess Diana’s support for campaigners. Diana, said Paul Heslop, a British mine clearance expert who escorted her on a visit to a minefield in Angola in 1997, “would be very disappointed that 28 years after her visit, and all the progress that been made since, that the world is taking a step backward.”
But “she would ask why this is happening” Mr. Heslop, who is the senior mine action adviser to the United Nations in Kyiv, added. The Ottawa Convention, he said, “would be completely intact if there had not been a war in Ukraine.”
Russia, the United States, China and a few other countries never signed up to the Ottawa Convention, but more than 160 others did.
Mary Wareham, a campaigner against antipersonnel mines who was involved in treaty negotiations in the 1990s, said the announced departures were a setback after decades of work to limit civilian casualties. They also “set a terrible precedent,” she added, for the stability of a vast edifice of international law governing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the conduct of war itself .
“Once an idea gets going it picks up steam,” said Ms. Wareham, who is the deputy director of the crisis, conflict and arms division at Human Rights Watch. “Where does it stop?”
The push by countries near Russia to leave the treaty started last year after a visit to Ukraine by Laurynas Kasciunas, then the defense minister of Lithuania.
Told by Ukrainian military officers that the ban on anti-personnel mines made it difficult to hold back Russian troops, he called for a review of their use by Baltic States.
“I understand the concerns about antipersonnel mines — they’ve caused immense suffering in many places,” he said in an interview.
But, Mr. Kasciunas added, claims that they are of little military use are untrue. “They do not directly stop a mechanized division, but they force the enemy to either take significant risks or commit time and resources to clearing operations,” he said.
Russia’s widespread use of antipersonnel mines played a significant in role in blunting a major Ukrainian offensive in 2023.
In March, the defense ministers of the three Baltic States and Poland, all members of NATO, said their countries needed to pull out of the mine ban accord because “military threats to NATO member states bordering Russia and Belarus have significantly increased.” Finland said in April that it, too, wanted out.
Ukraine, which formally joined the treaty in 2006, initially saw little reason to revive the use of antipersonnel mines. But, after its failed 2023 offensive and Russia’s increasing reliance on foot soldiers to lead assaults, it decided they were needed.
In an early blow to the treaty, the Biden administration last year approved supplying Ukraine with American antipersonnel mines.
Mr. Zelensky this month announced he had signed a decree to withdraw Ukraine from the Ottawa Convention because Russia, never a party to the treaty, was “using antipersonnel mines with utmost cynicism.”
Unlike the other countries that have announced their exit from the treaty, which mostly destroyed their stocks of anti-personnel mines, Ukraine still has a large stockpile of more than three million banned mines, half as many as it had before joining the treaty.
Whether it can legally use them even if it formally tries to leave the Ottawa Convention is unclear since the terms of the treaty bar a country at war from leaving.
Still, said Ms. Gabelnick, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines director, the unraveling in Eastern Europe of a long-established consensus against antipersonnel mines “opens up a very dangerous can of worms for everyone.”
Tomas Dapkus contributed reporting from Vilnius, Lithuania; Oleksandr Chubko from Kyiv, Ukraine; and Johanna Lemola from Helsinki, Finland.
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw. He covers a region that stretches from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Kosovo, Serbia and other parts of former Yugoslavia.
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